Why we share across Match Group companies

To support daily business and technical operations

Operating Plenty of Fish involves a lot of daily business and technical operations, including hosting data securely, providing you good customer care support, operating advertising and marketing campaigns, understanding what users like or dislike about our services so we can make them better, performing research and development, facilitating payments, managing revenue and accounting, fighting against spam, abuse, fraud and similar harmful behaviors, legal support and others. We share information about you with affiliated Match Group companies so they can help us perform some of these daily operations as our service providers.

To help keep you and others safe

We share and receive information about you with/across Match Group companies to aid us in our efforts to keep you safe. This enables us to do things like:

• Investigate, identify and take action against (e.g., ban) fake accounts, spam, abuse, fraud and other wrongdoings across Match Group services.
• Verify accounts across Match Group services, for instance by giving your accounts a “verified” status on multiple services, rather than just the one you actively verified on.
• Identify and combat potential discrimination or bias, by improving our ability to check the design and usage of Match Group services against discriminatory or biased outcomes.
• Work with law enforcement when we suspect things such as fraud or harmful or illegal activity, or to help prevent death or imminent bodily harm.

To provide features across Match Group

Depending on the service you use and the country you’re in, we might offer some features involving other Match Group Brands. For instance, in order to improve your chances at building significant connections with others, we may show your profile on other Match Group services or allow you to benefit from other cross-platform functionalities.  We will of course comply with applicable law and, where relevant, notify you of any such opportunity and allow you to agree or to refuse.

To personalize your experience on Match Group services (only applies to users of OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Stir, BLK, Upward and Chispa, located in the USA, excluding Utah, California, Colorado, Connecticut and Virginia)

If you’re using more than one Match Group service, sharing your information with other Match Group companies allows us to personalize your experience across these services. This personalization includes, for example, the prices and discounts you’ll experience on the Match Group services you use. For instance, the prices and discounts you may see for our service may vary, based on the fact that you also use another Match Group service or used a paid feature on that other service.

To help promote Match Group’s services (only applies to users of Okcupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Stir, BLK, Upward, Chispa and The League, located in the USA, excluding Utah, California, Colorado, Connecticut and Virginia)

Like other online providers, Match Group companies run ads promoting their services on third party platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and others. To power this marketing effort and target it to the right audience, companies typically share identifiers of existing members with the third party platforms on which they run ads, to either exclude these members from their marketing campaigns, or to target their ads at them or at an audience that is similar to them in terms of background, interests or app usage. Your identifiers can be used and shared as laid out above to promote Plenty of Fish and other Match Group services. As an example, another Match Group company whose service is highly engaged with by the single parent, the Black or the LGBTQ+ communities may run ads on Facebook to an audience that was created using identifiers of our single parents, Black or LGBTQ+ members.

To understand how people use Match Group services

Sharing information helps us understand how people use Match Group services, for instance by more accurately counting the number of unique registered, active or paid users across Match Group services, how many Match Group services they use on average, how people go from one to the other, and how usage patterns might differ.

To promote our services within the Match Group family of businesses

Understanding how people use Match Group services also helps us identify and personalize offers for other Match Group services that people may be interested in. For example, we may share identifiers, profile and activity data of our single parent, Latino or LGBTQ+ users so they can be shown offers for a different Match Group service that is highly engaged with by their community.