Often those settings are ignored or fuzzy. Tinder also doesn't show you what someone else's settings are, so you can't game that. When I'd set my age ranges to 30+, I'd still see people younger than that because the person on the other end would put older ranges in. It is kind of a two way fuzzy search engine.
I built a super popular dating app right before Tinder came onto the market... our search was intentionally pretty fuzzy in this regard.
My point is show me the proof. None of the details of how their app works are public and you're telling me what I've seen from personal experience, isn't true.
Unless I'm missing something, you haven't proved it's fuzzy either though. Many of these apps have a "make this setting strict" switch for age and distance, that makes both of you half right.
Maybe the part you're missing is that we are talking about Tinder from the response to the OP, downwards. We are not fuzzily talking about 'many of these apps'.
Maybe the part you're missing from my comment is that you have proven just as little yourself, and there is precedent for both.
Because you want to ignore that and nitpick that I mentioned other apps doing the same thing, as if that prevents Tinder from doing it, I went out of my way to get a screenshot of my own Tinder settings. What do you know? It's right here. "Only show people in this range" https://imgur.com/a/yt34L2b
Upon further reflection, I'm just going with "they were actually correct".
