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."
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.
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".
I had some person set up personal ads on eharmony and another website using my email address a while ago.
On both sites I logged in ("forgot password" link works great since it's my email, and somehow the second site emailed me the unchanged plaintext password so I could leave them both to what the person had set them...) and changed the "something else you should know about me" to be something like "I signed up for this site using a strangers email address, and they're going to delete this account soon if I don't change it" to be nice and give the person a chance if they actually wanted to find dates. The number of email notifications I got for people still trying to set up a date with "me" even with that little tidbit in the profile was kinda scary, so a week later I went through their "delete profile" procedure, and lo and behold I'm getting mail filtered to my spam folder to this day from eharmony asking me to sign back up. However, the second site seemed to be moderated by real people, and within a day of me adding that info the account was removed without me having to do anything more - and I haven't gotten any email from them since.
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.