I have been shadow-banned on an app (Tinder) and I cannot get around it. I have been doing some background research into how they are able to identify me and have come across device fingerprinting (I confirmed this through fiddler and seeing a device fingerprint being sent to their API) and perceptual hashing (to be able to identify you based on your old photos that you cropped a few pixels off to try fool any primitive hash algorithms etc)
I wrote a previous post on fingerprinting here.
I got a new email address, new phone number, deleted the native app then rebooted my router to get a new ip, used Firefox for mobile, but the same photos and no luck, still shadowbanned. I repeated the process using a different browser (would presumably have a different fingerprint) and a friend's photos and also no luck.
I don't believe perceptual hashing or facial recognition to ban users is feasible at their scale, as people use the same group photos etc. in their profiles. Also they must have a few billion photos, so there will be a lot of similar photos of people posing at famous landmarks etc. They have 200m users so 99% accuracy would still cause a support nightmare?
There is a similar report in the wild of the situation here.
How is it possible that they are still able to identify me?
