Slashdot Mirror
Looking For Love; Finding Privacy Violations
itwbennett writes "When you sign up for online dating, there's a certain amount of information you expect to give up, like whether or not your weight is proportional to your height. But you probably don't expect that your profile will remain online long after you stop subscribing to the service. In some cases your photo can be found even after being deleted from the index, according to the electronic frontier foundation (EFF), which identified six major security weaknesses in online dating sites."
How can something that was 'deleted' still be available? Obviously, it must not have been deleted. Whoever is lying should be brought to book.
I know I [might] have opened a can of worms. My law-inclined slashdotters are going to argue that I obviously "do not understand."
In a lot of systems, deleted simply means marked as deleted. What the system does with that information is another matter. Even in a file system, when a file is deleted, it is many times recoverable if it hasn't been overwritten with other data.
I'm too short for my weight.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
When you put data up on a system you are unable to
physically control, all sorts of things can happen to
that data, including things you might not like, and
in most cases you won't be able to do anything about it.
Facebook, Myspace, all of it is one big steaming pile of
shit and most of you idiots are walking right up and taking
a big bite like it was a tasty meal. Honestly it is impossible
to feel pity for you, because you do it to yourself.
ANYTHING you give up to a website is there for the duration of time. I just figure it will never go away.
Even if you run your own site, don't fool yourself that you can take down the information and it's gone. There are folks that archive web content and sell the historical data for profit. If you are expecting that Facebook or Twitter content can be deleted and it will be gone forever, you are a fool.
I'm always amazed at the number of folks who simply don't understand this, and think that they can delete their Facebook posts and they are gone. So I'm not suprised that data on dating sites might stick around after you are gone.
Don't think I'm right? Check this out: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I have several honeypot email accounts, and one kept getting emails that suggested it was somehow a member of a French on-line dating/introduction service.
The web site had no way to delete one's account, nor did the proprietors respond to emails.
My solution? I logged in and updated "my" personal information. I got nasty, every bit of the sickest crap I could think of.
They pulled my account within the hour. :-)
...laura
I tried a dating site long ago (eHarmony) and I found that they are utterly worthless for finding real relationships with real people. All it does is attract spammers, scammers, and predators. If you want to date, get to know people in your local community. To dating sites, you are just money to be made.
My online dating profiles of course. You see by posting profiles that are completely full of lies I have totally side stepped the security issue! There is no way that anyone can trace my profiles back to a real person.
So nyah nyah nyah to all you suckers how put your real photos and descriptions out there in public - you'll never know who has your information now, while I'm free of any worries at all.
(But please don't remind me that I am posting on /. on a Saturday night)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
"like whether or not your weight is proportional to your height" Of course it's proportional (unless your height is 0, in which case the proportion is undefined).
He who reflects on another man`s want of breeding, shows he wants it as much himself --Julius Caesar, per Plutarch
It's OK that my picture and profile is still "up" at several dating websites. I don't mind, because I am human and not ashamed of the fact that we must reproduce in order to exist. Thank goodness everything I put up was in good taste. My only regret is posting on several STD dating sites before finding out I didn't have any disease. :D :P
Isn't weight proportional to cube of height?
Racist, mean-spirited, AND completely off-topic.
Congrats on the trifecta, moron.
Reading the article it is worse than just the deletion problem. If your profile is on the site ever, it is on google forever. Making it available to google seems like a pretty big breach of trust. You look at a site like OkCupid, that allows users to set their profiles to private. With google and google caching, that setting is bypassed entirely. That is simply a failure on OkCupid's part, they either don't have the technical skill to properly secure their site, or they choose not to despite telling users their info is restricted to other users only. Either way, false advertising.
The best way for a dating site to attract new members is to have a lot of "inventory" in the form of user profiles. Having a larger inventory also means they can ask for more money from advertisers. Again it's a case of "if you aren't paying you aren't the customer, you're the product".
that's ok. non whites dump on whites all the time and it's considered 'empowerment.'
Online dating was really cool for about six months in 1998. Since then, it's been a scam.
The history of Friendfinder (which now owns Penthouse and tried to buy Playboy) is interesting, in the litigation sense.
...like whether or not your weight is proportional to your height.
So it's OK if I put on weight as long as I get proportionally taller at the same time?
Have gnu, will travel.
Anything you put online will forever be cached by somebody.
The thing about that website is that it was free; others have left a very bad impression, the worst one being match.com . I don't know if it has changed since then, but about 1999 I put my details on their site and got an interested email a few hours later. Of course, I couldn't reply, as you had to pay for membership before you could contact anyone. So I paid £5 for a month's subscription and messaged back. I got no reply. I think it was just an automated match.com robot designed to suck in the desperate into paying up. A little while later, I created a sock puppet account with the most repulsive details I could imagine. I got a couple of messages from people who said they were interested and wanted to know more. In my mind, proof that match.com would do anything to make you part with your money. I didn't and it put me off dating sites until a few years later when I happened to read a newspaper article which rekindled my interest.
My web domain.
Things don't "just happen" to my data. What can and can't be done with it, is regulated by the European Data Protection Directive, UK Data Protection Act 1998, and several other laws which reflect European attitudes to the key role of privacy in human rights law.
However there are gaping loopholes:
Personal information may not be sent outside the European Economic Area unless the individual whom it is about has consented.
So buried in the terms will be a clause consenting to export my data to a data ghetto such as the United States, and that is where the problems begin.
Similarly, sites web-based brain-training services like Lumosity are capturing and keeping data that describes your cognitive function. First, this is very cool: it may provide the data points researchers need to discover once and for all whether training IQ is, in fact, possible (and if so, how to do it). And second, this is very scary: Woe be unto the users if the databse is hacked, opened, or otherwise sprung. You think carrying a height/weight ratio with you from a dating site is disturbing? What about carrying your IQ or ability to learn? Simply: yikes.
GeekDad, TED speaker, Wipeout loser, author of Brain Trust
Make sure you choose a good picture, because it's going to be online long after you're gone :)
If you're not on facebook and have friends, how do you friend them?
I am pretty sure that an old account somewhere or other's email has been sold off to trojan spammers, I get a ton of dating site looking spam with questionable attachments, these days.
I can remember joining one of these dating services several years ago. A woman I contacted expressed surprise that she was still on the system. She was fairly good looking, so I figured that she was left on because of the desire for customer bait. She had been divorced 3 times and didn't want to meet because I had never been married.
I met my wife through Match.Com. We've been together now for just shy of 7 years. I pinged her the day after she had decided decided to pull her profile and let her account lapse. Fortunately, she hadn't yet gotten around to it when my forwarded email arrived in her inbox. She told me later that I intrigued her so much she re-subscribed just to reply.
We spent a week and a lot of emails back and forth before we agreed to meet for a quick dinner date. Three and a half hours into what was supposed to be less than an hour, we knew we were on to something good. :-)
Now, we had several factors working in our favor. First, we were both in our 40s so we had enough life experience to spot the obvious predators. Second, we were both coming off long term first marriages that had failed partially due to a lack of honest communication on our partners' part so we were prepared to be up front about our expectations. Third, both of us were prepared to just let the relationship develop naturally and not force it. Fourth, we had both followed up a few contacts on the site already (she more than me, actually) so we had a pretty good idea about how online communication can sometimes obscure true intent.
My advice would be to treat online dating as just one more option to meeting people. If things click between you and someone else, great! If not, in many ways it's a lot easier to walk away from an online relationship gone bad than, say, someone you met at work, at church, or your favorite local watering hole.
Hi, fellow troll!. Why don't you update your script to point to goatse.ru, or similar?
So sad to see the effor wasted
Again, you? Please fix your link. I want Goatse!
From OKC, Why you should never pay for online dating. Of course "mysteriously" deleted from cupid's site by the CEO shortly after match.com bought them out.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
And probably better, because who actually tells the truth on a dating site?
You wanted to get screwed or not?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Try deleting your Slashdot account.
Why, do you have something to hide? A pro-Microsoft comment made when you were young and needed the money?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it