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."

Comments

Do not date online

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

Re:Difficult deletions

[cshake]

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.

Re:Obviously, deletion was never the case!

[hairyfeet]

Sadly a lot of these sites are either filled with scammers or datamine and spam the living hell out of anyone that signs up, i should know as i deal with a lot of folks that have gotten their first computer so I have to warn them and be on the lookout for them as they learn the ropes. Its made all the harder to warn folks because it seems like everybody knows someone who found their current SO through online, hell that's where I got my GF of 4 years, I signed up to get one of my buds to STFU about the stupid site and my little Cherokee princess saw I was a PC guy and asked if I could help her fix the sound on her desktop. I would have never met her IRL since we didn't travel in the same circles but my family just loves her to pieces and we've been happily together ever since.

So if you know anyone that is new to computers or are starting online dating please have them look at a site like Romance Scams so they can see what to watch out for, i know one of the mods and they are good folks just trying to warn the folks about how slick these new scams are. Like the malware I have to deal with daily it seems they get better and smarter at this each year and become harder for those that aren't alert to spot.