Tinder Business Cards Mix Work with Play

You can now generate business cards with your Tinder profile and hand them out to total strangers.

January 26, 2016, 5:10pm

The homepage of Tinder Me. All images courtesy of the artists

The Belgian privacy-artist Dries Depoorter is no stranger to controversy. A couple of months ago we spoke to him about his art project Tinder In, in which he collected the profile pictures of unsuspecting people on Tinder and Linkedin and exhibited them side by side on his website. The project exploded onto the internet and so did its critics, who claimed the project violated the privacy of its subjects. Depoorter pointed out that the profile pictures were all publicly available online before ultimately blurring them and issuing a statement in which he further explained the idea behind the series.

Now that the dust has somewhat settled, Depoorter is back with a follow-up project made in collaboration with Belgian artist Ward Oosterlijnck. Named Tinder Me, it once again uses profiles found on Tinder, but now the key player is someone else entirely: you.

Tinder Me is a website that allows you to automatically generate your own business cards from your Tinder profile. After entering your username, the card generator uses the information on your profile to make a free pdf file with eight cards, including your name, job title, profile picture, and a QR-code linking to your online profile, accompanied by the words: ‘Like me on Tinder.’

A rendering of the Tinder business cards.

Like so many other projects by the artist, it also points to a serious online privacy risk in using the popular app. Depoorter conceived the website after learning that Tinder now wants to encourage its users to put their profiles on public. “A few weeks ago I was reading through the FAQ of the platform when I came across this new feature,” he tells The Creators Project. “It prompts the user to fill in its name to get a personal URL for your account, which you can share with others. It didn’t make sense to me, why would you want to share your Tinder with someone you already know? Doesn’t that kinda defeat the whole purpose of Tinder? And why would it benefit the company when all of its profiles are made public?

While Tinder did a poor job in answering those questions (see the emails below), Depoorter and Oosterlijnck realized that this new feature had in fact opened the door to a social network that is normally known for its anonymity. “We first had the idea to make a search engine of all the public profiles, allowing you to check if your ex is on Tinder, for example,” he explains. “But then we realized it would be way more fun if you could just use it for your own account. Or for your friends, as long as they have their profiles set to public.”

Tinder Me can be seen as a lighthearted critique of where we, as a generation, stand when it comes to dating. In a sense, the project is almost a way of closing the loop: by placing the platform that once disrupted the dating game back into the real world, we’re sort of back to where we started—only, with some dorky business cards to show for it. “I definitely believe Tinder has caused us to flirt less in real life, so maybe this could turn things around. What I like about it is that it actually postpones that dreaded moment where you ask someone out in real life and he or she either says yes or no. With this you basically say: here’s my card, see if you like me in the morning.”

Whether that actually works is, though, another thing altogether. Depoorter will find out soon enough. “I’m going out with some friends this weekend. I will try them out then.”