Ireland’s privacy watchdog has fined Match Group €11mn after finding that Tinder’s “Download My Data” tool failed to give users a full copy of the personal data the company holds on them, Politico reports.
In a decision announced on Friday, the Data Protection Commission said the tool omitted certain categories of information entirely and reduced others to summaries, falling short of the GDPR’s right of access, which entitles people to see everything a company holds about them.
Alongside the fine, Tinder’s owner received a reprimand and three months to bring its data processing into compliance.
Automated download tools can be a useful way of answering access requests, deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said, but they “must be fair and transparent to individuals regarding the extent of the data provided.”
“Tinder engaged with the DPC throughout this investigation, and we stand behind the privacy protections we’ve built for our users,” a spokesperson told Politico.
The decision closes an inquiry opened in early 2020, one of a pair the Irish regulator announced in the same week. The other, into Google’s location data, concluded in September when the commission fined Google €403M .
Tinder’s case took almost six years from opening to decision, a timescale that has become the standard complaint about Dublin’s enforcement of EU privacy law.
For Match Group, the number is close to a non-event. The company had warned investors the case could cost it as much as $60mn, and by mid-2026 had set aside a $9.1mn provision in its accounts, according to its filings. The €11mn penalty lands just above the provision and far below the warning.
The DPC is the lead EU privacy regulator for most US tech firms, courtesy of their Dublin headquarters, and its recent docket has been heavier: TikTok’s €530mn fine over data transfers to China was upheld by the Irish High Court in July.
The Tinder decision is smaller, but it polices one of the GDPR’s plainest promises: ask a company what it knows about you, and it has to show you all of it, not the highlights reel.
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