Images of Tinder users “were swept up in a massive grab of some 40,000 photos from the dating app by a dataset collector who plans to use the selfies in artificial intelligence training,” writes Slashdot reader Frosty Piss, sharing this summary of a report in TechCrunch.
Tinder said in a statement that the photo sweeper “violated the terms of our service” and “we are taking appropriate action and investigating further.” The creator of the data set, Stuart Colianni, has released it under a CC0: Public Domain License and also uploaded his scraper script to GitHub.

He describes it as a “simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset,” saying his inspiration for creating the scraper was disappointment working with other facial data sets. He also describes Tinder as offering “near unlimited access to create a facial data set,” and says scraping the app offers “an extremely efficient way to collect such data.”

The article notes that Tinder’s API has already been used for other “weird, wacky, and creepy” projects, including “hacking it to automatically like every potential date to save on thumb-swipes; offering a paid look-up service for people to check up on whether a person they know is using Tinder; and even building a catfishing system to snare horny bros and make them unwittingly flirt with each other.
“So you could argue that anyone creating a profile on Tinder should be prepared for their data to leech outside the community’s porous walls in various different ways — be it as a single screenshot, or via one of the aforementioned API hacks. But the mass harvesting of thousands of Tinder profile photos to act as fodder for feeding AI models does feel like another line is being crossed.”

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Source: Slashdot – Massive Tinder Photo Scrape Has Users Upset

An anonymous reader writes: Ever since I started coding, I have always loved object-oriented design patterns. I built an HTML preprocessor that adds inheritance, polymorphism, and public methods to this venerable language. It offers more freedom than a templating engine and has a wider variety of use cases. Pull requests appreciated!

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Source: Slashdot – Developer Hacks Together Object-Oriented HTML

The Atlantic’s CityLab describes “a massive surge in deliveries to residential dwellings…creating a traffic nightmare.” An anonymous reader quotes their report:
While truck traffic currently represents about 7% of urban traffic in American cities, it bears a disproportionate congestion cost of $28 billion, or about 17% of the total U.S. congestion costs, in wasted hours and gas. Cities, struggling to keep up with the deluge of delivery drivers, are seeing their curb space and streets overtaken by double-parked vehicles, to say nothing of the bonus pollution and roadwear produced thanks to a surfeit of Amazon Prime orders… Often, the box trucks will double-park in a two-lane street if there’s no loading zone to pull into, snarling traffic behind them… “The streets were not designed for that kind of activity,” says Alison Conway, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York.
Scott Kubly, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation, says “With the volume of deliveries, ticketing isn’t effective for us in terms of managing the street. UPS and FedEx will just negotiate a lump sum payment for all the tickets they get instead of fighting every ticket”… In 2011 in Washington, D.C., UPS alone received just shy of 32,000 tickets. Instead of adjudicating each ticket, many large cities will strike agreements or introduce programs through which delivery companies can pay off all tickets in one swoop.

The article points out online retails sales have grown 15% every year this decade in the U.S. — calling it the other side of the “retail apocalypse” that’s killing brick-and-mortar stores.

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Source: Slashdot – E-Commerce Is Clogging City Streets With Delivery Trucks

An anonymous reader writes:
“Google [is] commanding 58% of U.S. K-12 schools. Windows is in second with around 22% and the combined impact of MacOS and iOS are close behind at 19%,” reports TechCrunch, citing figures from consulting firm Futuresource. But now Chromebooks are under fire from cheaper iPads and Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 Cloud laptop with its cloud-based software. “For many schools, the dream of a one-device-per-child experience has finally been realized through a consumer technology battle waged by the biggest names in the industry… Fostering an entire generation of first-time computer users with your software and device ecosystem could mean developing lifelong loyalties, which is precisely why all this knock-down, drag-out fight won’t be drawing to a close any time soon.”
That raises an interesting question. Do Slashdot readers remember the computers that were used in their own high schools — and did that instill any lifelong brand loyalty?

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft And Apple Target Schools In War With Chromebook