Badoo

Is Badoo safe?

Badoo is a middling choice on safety and a weak one on privacy. It shares Bumble's better tools against harassment and fake accounts, including photo verification and automatic blurring of nude images. But its App Store label says location, contact details, identifiers and usage data may be used to track you across other companies' apps and websites, and its history includes a $40 million biometric privacy settlement and a large, never fully verified data leak. We score it 46/100, four points below Bumble.

Badoo launched in 2006 and is now part of Bumble Inc., which says Badoo leads the market in several countries in Europe and Latin America. The Badoo app and Bumble's other smaller apps had about 1.2 million paying users a month on average in 2025.

What Badoo does with your data

Badoo's App Store label is long even for a dating app. Data "used to track you" covers location, contact info, identifiers, usage data and other data. Data linked to you for third-party advertising includes precise and coarse location, contact info, device IDs and advertising data. For Badoo's own marketing, the label adds photos, health and fitness data and "sensitive info", which on a dating app can include sexual orientation.

Google Play's data safety section adds one more detail worth knowing. It lists emails and in-app messages among data collected for "advertising or marketing", as well as for app features and fraud checks. It also says payment information and in-app messages may be shared with other companies for fraud prevention and security.

In Illinois, users sued Badoo and Bumble under the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act, alleging the apps collected facial scans without the consent the law requires. The companies agreed a $40 million settlement in 2024 for Illinois users between November 2016 and December 2021, and agreed to delete biometric data they had collected. A settlement is not a finding of wrongdoing.

The 2013 leak and later claims

In 2016 a database said to come from Badoo was traded among hackers. Have I Been Pwned, the breach-checking service, lists 112 million unique email addresses with names, dates of birth, usernames and passwords stored as MD5 hashes, an old and weak method. It marks the breach as unverified: there were "many indicators" that Badoo was breached, but its origin could not be proven.

In July 2026 the Spanish outlet Escudo Digital reported that a seller on a dark web forum claimed to hold a database of more than 51 million Badoo accounts. The data had not been independently verified, and the outlet noted it could be old leaked records or scraped profiles. Treat it as a claim, not a confirmed breach, but it is another reason not to reuse your Badoo password anywhere else.

Badoo does not say its chats are end-to-end encryptedEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary. Assume the company can read them, and keep anything you would not want leaked out of a dating app.

Fake profiles and romance scams

Badoo's audience is large, global and mostly on the free tier, which suits scammers. The FTC counted nearly 70,000 US romance scam reports with $1.3 billion in losses in 2022, with a median loss of $4,400. The usual script is a match who is overseas for work, quickly moves to WhatsApp, cannot video call, and then mentions crypto trading or an emergency.

Badoo's defences are the same as Bumble's:

• Photo verification with a filter so you only interact with verified profiles.
• Private Detector, which blurs explicit photos so you can choose to view or block them.
• Deception Detector, technology that Badoo says aims to block fake, scam and spam accounts. No figures are published.
• Video chat inside the app, so you can check a match before giving out your number.

Badoo's listing describes a "three-step verification process" without saying whether it includes an ID check. Photo verification proves someone matches their pictures; it does not prove who they are or that they are safe to meet.

How to use Badoo more safely

1. Verify your own profile, then switch on the option to interact only with verified profiles.
2. Video call inside Badoo before you meet. Repeated excuses are a warning sign.
3. Keep chats in the app until you have met. Badoo cannot see or act on scams that move to WhatsApp or Telegram.
4. Never send money, gift cards or crypto, and treat any investment tip as a scam.
5. On iPhone, choose "Ask App Not to Track" when Badoo asks, and on Android reset or delete your advertising ID in Google settings.
6. Use a unique password for Badoo and change it if you used the app before 2014.

How we scored it

Privacy (35) is the weakest factor, because Badoo's labels list location, contact details and even messages for tracking, advertising or marketing. Scams and harmful content (44) gives credit for verification and nude blurring but reflects a large free audience. Security (48) is lower than Bumble's because of the unverified 2013 leak and the unconfirmed 2026 claim, and the regulatory record (64) reflects the biometric settlement without any regulator fine. Tinder is the closest large rival.