Lovoo Mining

Inspiration

All the time sensual user information is sent throughout the internet. Especially when it comes to social services, things get really nasty. So we decided to look out and see where we can easily grab data and visualize to show people, that there are problems.

What it does

We crawl the lovoo apis to collect data on users on various locations. We are able to track them, we are able to determine their age, their sexual orientation, their profile picture and sometimes even their instagram and snapchat account names. With some more work we will also be able to create movement profiles over time.

How we built it

We used python to crawl the API that is actually used by lovoo to feed their apps (even the web client). Inspired by some implementations found in the package lovpy (https://github.com/sarandafl/lovpy) we built our own parser, that made use of some characteristics of that API to retrieve as much data as possible. We then built a tiny react application to be able to visualize that data we stored. The integration between the crawler and the UI is still really ugly, but we had no time to prettify that. You have to manually extract the result data as json and feed it to the UI.

Challenges I ran into

moral concerns
being new to python
customizing google maps
emoji encoding (we wanted to put in a shit emoji here, but it seemed to crash devpost :D)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

being able to fetch sensitive data without breaking into something. we just used apis that are available to everyone very easily

What I learned

hacking in python :D
reactjs

What's next for Lovoo Map

we'll probably switch the repository back to private again after the DO! Hack and contact the development team of lovoo and suggest some changes (as rate limiting, frugality of data, mechanisms equally to tinder)
based on the reaction of lovoo we will probably release abstract/anonymized sets of data
maybe we will add features like long-term geo-tracking. we can determine the last position provided by lovoo, so we can log this and create movement profiles... even creepier