Jewish Dating App Jcrush Leaves 200,000 Users’ Personal Data Exposed
Image by tommaso79/iStock
(JTA) — A security lapse at the JCrush dating application for Jews left sensitive personal data of about 200,000 users exposed.
The breach, rooted in the site’s failure to encrypt its data, gave anyone who knew where to look access to users’ real name, gender, email address, IP address, location, age, sexual preferences and religious denomination, TechCrunch reported Tuesday.
It even allowed access to logged correspondence on the site’s chat platform.
Data security experts Noam Rotem and Ran Locar shared their findings TechCrunch.
Depending on how the user signed up, the records also show the user’s Facebook ID, which points directly to their Facebook profile. It also includes the access token, which can be used to take over a JCrush user’s account without needing their password.
In some cases, the geolocation data was so accurate it was easy to identify exactly where some users lived — especially in residential neighborhoods.
A spokesperson for JCrush’s parent company, Northsight Capital, said it was “aware” of the situation and “secured the database immediately when the problem occurred,” TechCrunch reported.
“There have not been any indications that the data had been accessed by malicious parties or misused in anyway,” said the company.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
