Breach date: 2018-09-05. Added to this index: 2025-03-03. Accounts affected: about 221K. Domain: colordatingapp.com.
What happened
In September 2018, the dating app to match people with different ethnicities Color Dating suffered a data breach that was later redistributed as part of a larger corpus of data. The breach exposed 220k unique email addresses along with bios, names, profile photos and bcrypt password hashes.
Breach data sourced from Have I Been Pwned, used under CC BY 4.0. Additional breach metadata provided by XposedOrNot. DataExposed is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.
What was exposed
Bios: The free text about me section you wrote for a profile on a dating app, forum, social network, gaming platform or professional site.
Dates of birth: Your full birth date, day, month and year, collected at signup for age checks, identity verification, insurance quotes, birthday offers or government services.
Email addresses: The email address you used to register or log in. It is the most common field in breaches because it doubles as your username on most sites.
Geographic locations: A general location recorded on your account, such as a country, state, city, postcode or region, either typed in by you or estimated from your IP address.
Names: Your first name, surname and sometimes middle name or initials, as you gave them when you signed up. It appears in almost every breach because nearly every account asks for it.
Passwords: The secret you use to sign in, stored by the breached service either in plain text, in a scrambled form called a hash, or encrypted. How it was stored decides how quickly it can be recovered.
Profile photos: The main picture on your account, usually a real photo of your face on dating, professional, social and messaging services.
What to do now
Check whether your own address is in this dataset with the free email breach check.
Change the password on this service and every other site where you used the same password.
Turn on two-factor authentication on your email account first, because it is the reset path for everything else.
Treat calls and messages that quote real details about you as hostile until you verify them another way.
Frequently asked questions
What data was leaked in the Color Dating breach?
The Color Dating breach exposed Bios, Dates of birth, Email addresses, Geographic locations, Names, Passwords, Profile photos. About 221K accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the Color Dating breach?
Run the free email breach check with the address you used on that service. It will tell you whether your address appears in this dataset.
What should I do about the Color Dating breach?
Change the password on that account and everywhere you reused it, then turn on two-factor authentication. Passwords from this breach are traded and tried automatically against other sites.