There's something jarring about seeing a Tinder match who you've never even added to your phone contacts suddenly show up in the ‘People You May Know’ section on Facebook.
It's sort of the digital equivalent to talking to someone in a bar, and then the next day they show up in line behind you at Starbucks – sure, it could be a coincidence, but something feels off.
As more and more people are reporting this Tinder-Facebook (or OK Cupid-Facebook) phenomenon, Vice's Motherboard went in search of an answer, and it turns out it's probably a lot less diabolical than you think.
The easy conclusion to jump to, of course, is that your dating app is giving and or selling your information to Facebook.
Because Facebook's algorithms are as mysterious as the Bermuda Triangle or whatever happened to that Jay Electronica album, it's not possible to know with 100 percent certainty, but experts seem to think that's probably not the case.
“It seems highly suspect they’d actually be sharing that info with Facebook, and I don’t see what benefit it would serve either company,” a software engineer with experience with both Facebook and Tinder told the blog.
More likely, Facebook is suggesting friends based on people whose profiles you've searched for and viewed, which is something almost everyone does before going on a date with a complete stranger. It could also be that Facebook is suggesting friends based on who has searched and viewed your profile as well.
“It would almost be silly for them not to: if you've shown an interest in a person while using Facebook, then you've as good as told Facebook that you might want to have some kind of relationship with them,"another expert, this one a computer science professor at Carleton College, told Motherboard.
So next time this happens, don't worry, the Internet is only very creepy, but not necessarily super creepy.
