Breach date: 2020-01-26. Added to this index: 2021-01-31. Accounts affected: about 1.4M. Domain: meetmindful.com.
What happened
In early 2020, the online dating service MeetMindful suffered a data breach that exposed 1.4 million unique customer email addresses. Included in the data was an extensive array of personal information used to find romantic matches including physical attributes, use of alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, marital statuses, birthdates, genders and the gender being sought. Additional personal information such as names, geographical locations and IP addresses were also exposed, along with passwords stored as bcrypt 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
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.
Drinking habits: Answers about alcohol use, such as never, socially or regularly, stored by dating apps, health and fitness apps, insurer questionnaires, surveys, and sometimes treatment or recovery services.
Drug habits: Answers or records about recreational or prescription drug use, stored by dating apps, harm reduction and health apps, surveys, insurers, treatment services and sometimes workplace drug testing providers.
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.
Genders: The gender or sex recorded on your profile, usually picked from a list at signup, sometimes with a title such as Mr or Ms or a gender identity option beyond male and female.
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.
IP addresses: The network addresses your devices used when you signed up, logged in or posted, recorded by almost every website in its access logs.
Marital statuses: Your relationship status, such as single, married, de facto, separated, divorced or widowed, collected by insurers, lenders, government forms, dating apps and marketing surveys.
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.
Physical attributes: Details describing your body and appearance, such as height, weight, build, eye colour, hair colour and body type, common on dating, fitness and health services.
Religions: Your faith, denomination, beliefs or religious community membership, recorded by dating apps, faith apps, charities, schools, churches and community organisations.
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 MeetMindful breach?
The MeetMindful breach exposed Dates of birth, Drinking habits, Drug habits, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, IP addresses, Marital statuses, Names, Passwords, Physical attributes, Religions, Sexual orientations, Smoking habits, Social media profiles, Usernames. About 1.4M accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the MeetMindful 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 MeetMindful 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.