FORBES - Nov 8 - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered entering the online dating business as far back as 2014, but he put the idea on the back burner, instead giving Tinder special access to its users' data, leaked emails between top executives show. The leaked correspondence is part of an ongoing lawsuit between Facebook and Six4Three, a now-defunct app developer that sued Facebook in 2015 for restricting user data access, alleging the actions were uncompetitive. The correspondence shows how perilously close Tinder came to losing key access to Facebook user information that helped Tinder grow rapidly in its early years, when members often used their Facebook logins to access the app. When Facebook further restricted the kind of information third-party apps could access after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March 2018, Tinder's app crashed. Tinder was on Facebook's radar in 2013. Zuckerberg wrote in January 2014 to two executives: "Tinder's growth is especially alarming to me because their product is built completely on Facebook data, and it's much better than anything we've built for recommendations using the same corpus." In 2014, Facebook announced it would start preventing third-party app developers from having access to data on users' friends, including birth dates, photos and pages they liked. The company gave a May 2015 deadline for developers to comply with its new set of access rules. However, Zuckerberg made some companies and apps an exception. Tinder was one. Facebook agreed to give Tinder a special data-sharing agreement, internally known as "whitelists," if the dating app shared trademark rights on "MOMENTS." which was the planned name for a photo app that Facebook wanted to launch, an email exchange in March 2015 showed. When asked about this agreement in 2018, a spokeswoman for Tinder said: "Tinder never received special treatment, data or access related to this dispute or its resolution." Other dating apps that had whitelist agreements with Facebook include Bumble, Badoo, Coffee Meets Bagel, Hinge and jSwipe.
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