Why You Can’t Unblur OkCupid Likes

Awhile back I did a couple of tutorials for unblurring Tinder matches. Not only did the hack allow you to view the matches, but it also allowed you to see all the other photos the user that liked you had. Given these are paid features, it isn’t a surprise that Tinder’s engineers likely proactively scour the web for similar hacks to shut them down, and while the original hack still works, the one to see all of a user’s photos no longer does.

Of course, with the success of that hack, it didn’t take long before people were asking about similar hacks for OkCupid and Bumble. Unfortunately, despite my own efforts and lots of research, it appears such hacks don’t work for OkCupid – and as I explain in another post neither do they work for Bumble.

OkCupid Uses Generic Blurred Photos

While dating apps like Tinder and Bumble appear to use the actual photos of the individual that has liked you and then blur them out, from as far as I can tell, OkCupid just uses generic blurred photos. One hint of that is that if you look at the blurred photos of the people that have liked you, they are all extremely similar in the fact that they appear to be a highly blurred portrait over the top of a colorful background.

Remove the paywall box is as simple as removing a line in the Inspection Tool of Chrome, but it really doesn’t do you any good.

What you notice is that the entire group of portraits that are blurred out is actually one single image. In fact, you can just go to the URL (https://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/alist/fuzzy_faces_paywall_desktop.png) and see for yourself. You’ll notice, unlike Tinder that has a blur filter masked over the top of the images on the browser side, this large “fuzzy faces paywall” image is just blurred by default, which likely means the images that comprise it are just generic photos shown to everyone – though they likely have different versions of it.

My hopes were increased when I headed over to the network tab and found an image titled 43.png that was blurred out, but interestingly enough that image itself appears to just be generic also.

In fact, if you right-click on it and copy the URL, you’ll notice that you can swap out “43” for any number between 1 and 100 and you’ll be shown a generic blurred portrait of your supposed people that have liked you.

The image I was shown was “*/43.png”, but you can literally replace “43” with “65“, “1“, “99“, or any other number up to 100 and be shown a different photo.

My assumption is that given this is a feature a user would like to exploit like we did with Tinder and get paid features for free (sort of), OkCupid simply shows a randomly generated version of a blurred image depending upon the number of likes a user has accumulated.

Bumble, on the other hand, actually shows the right portrait. However, Bumble smartly blurs the photo on the server-side rather than the client-side where the blur can be removed.