A reminder today that if you're not paying for a product, then you just might be the product.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jamali. My colleague Jesus Alberado asked me this week if I'd heard of cuffing season.

I had not.

It turns out it's that time of year when singles hunker down with someone to keep them warm for winter.

Well, Valentine's Day kind of marks the end of all that.

People are flocking back to their dating apps,

and a lot of those apps are eager to vacuum up your

personal data. That's according to Nord-VPN cyber security expert Adriana's

Farmanhoven. So when you install the app, the operating system says,

this app wants to use your microphone or your audio.

And you use the user says, yeah, sure.

And dating apps actually ask for a lot, a lot of

permissions, some even are dangerous because they are on system level, some are

highly questionable like biometric data. A lot of them just ask a lot of you

and they put it under the guise of, well the more we know about you the easier it is for us to find you a match.

And I think we're all familiar with the idea that these apps are collecting our data.

But get specific with me.

What are some of the different types of data that are being collected?

One is location, they have access to your messaging.

An important thing that people don't realize is that there's a lot of metadata.

And metadata is a really dangerous thing because people have no feel or concept with it

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