Forensic Analysis of the Bumble Dating App for Android

Abstract

Mobile applications that facilitate interaction between people have grown in popularity and, as a result, the number of e-dating applications have expanded. In these types of applications, there is usually a trade-off between user privacy and safety. On one hand, users want to keep their data as private as possible, on the other hand, user identification forces accountability, which, hopefully, will foster the development of responsible behaviors and minimize abuses. The Bumble e-dating app has been growing in popularity and differs from other apps by giving women the power to make the first contact after a match. Their main goal is to prevent women’s harassment. In this work, we study the digital artifacts that can be found after the use of the Bumble app on Android devices. Despite applying many measures to ensure data protection, it was possible to obtain information that identifies users and exchanged messages. The data structure stored on the device is described, as well as the artifacts with forensic value for an investigation. Moreover, a script was created to parse and visualize the main forensic artifacts of the Bumble app.