I saw something pretty mind-blowing the other week.
Whilst doomscrolling through some YouTube shorts, I was presented with video in the all-too-familiar street interview style that you may have seen before. This one featured the interviewer asking a guy whether he would want to know whether his girlfriend was actively using a dating app. The interviewer then started using an app called Cheater Buster AI to find the answer, asking some basic information and taking a photo of the girlfriend. You can watch the video for yourself:
Now it does seem like a lot of these videos are staged. Or this least seems to be the consensus when I searched for posts about this app on X. But I was still curious if this fakeness extended to the app itself - is there really a Cheater Buster app and, if so, how does it actually work? It seemed like a massive privacy red-flag.
And indeed there is such an app. On its ‘About Us‘ page on its website, Cheater Buster’s stated mission is to “give people a practical way to verify public profile activity and make informed decisions based on real signals instead of guesswork.”
The way these apps work is simple. You enter the name of the person you are searching for, as well as their approximate age and location, with the option to also upload a photo of the person. The app then compares the search query information with dating profiles on Tinder, returning a list of potential matches. The search results include profile pictures, bios and recent activity and change indicators (e.g., how long the person has been on Tinder for).
There is a notable lack of information available regarding how the app provides this service from a technical perspective. Tinder does not provide an official API, and the normal UX for its app only allows users to swipe through profiles presented to them by Tinder’s algorithms. There is no ability for users to directly search for other profiles. So how an app like Cheater Buster is able to retrieve dating profiles from Tinder is uncertain.
Also unclear is the facial recognition technology (FRT) being used for processing the images added to the search query. Computer vision techniques today are not only quite advanced but also widely available, with several different open-source implementations that can be used and integrated into other systems or apps. This has given rise to services like PimEyes, an image search engine that allows users to upload a person’s photo and find other images of that same person existing across the internet. Interestingly, Cheater Buster published a blog post in 2024 positioning its app as an alternative to PimEyes.
The reviews of Cheater Buster are mixed, with an average rating on Trustpilot of 2.9. Some people on Reddit claim that they have been able to find people using the app, but it seems that the quality of the matches is largely dependent on the quality of information provided in the search query.
What I find fascinating about this app is what it represents about privacy in our digital age.
There are two things in particular here:
Consumer surveillance tech continues to advance and proliferate
The general attitudes towards privacy and data protection still seem quite weak