Gaping security holes riddle popular mobile dating sites-still. In January, an Australian hacker exploited a security flaw in Grindr, the mobile app that allows gay and questioning men to find sexual partners nearby through the use of GPS technology.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to impersonate another user, send messages on his behalf, access sensitive data like photos and messages, and even view passwords. Your profile is indexed by Google. Even something as small as a unique turn of phrase could show up in search results and bring casual visitors to your page.

Your pictures can identify you. Users hoping to create a barrier between their real identities and their online dating profiles might use strategies such as pseudonyms and misleading information in a profile to obfuscate their identity.

However, just changing your name and a few facts about your life may not be enough. If you use a photo on your dating site that can be associated with one of your other online accounts—for example, if it had previously been shared on your Facebook profile or LinkedIn profile — then your real identity could be easily discovered.

What you can do about it: Face it no pun intended : there are a number of ways your online dating profile can be connected to your real identity, especially if you have a robust online life. Photos are a particular vulnerability. Try searching for the image using TinEye and Google Image Search before uploading it.

And be aware that search technology and facial recognition technology is rapidly evolving. This might be a particular concern for individuals who use niche dating sites, such as HIV-positive or queer dating sites.

Your data is helping online marketers sell you stuff. The cynics among us might think this is the primary purpose of an online dating site. The operators of these sites cull vast amounts of data from users age, interests, ethnicity, religion, etc. In addition, last October researcher Jonathan Mayer discovered that OkCupid was actually leaking 1 personal data to some of its marketing partners. Information such as age, drug use, drinking frequency, ethnicity, gender, income, relationship status, religion and more was leaked to online advertiser Lotame.

What you can do about it: You should consider contacting the sites you use to clarify their practices and letting them know your concerns. If you are dissatisfied with a company's practices with sharing data, you might also consider filing a complaint with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's Online Complaint Center.

Remember, part of what helps companies change practices is public interest in an issue, so blog posts and public discussion can help push companies to adopt better practices. HTTPS support is a wreck on many of the popular online dating sites , meaning you risk exposing your browsing history, messages, and much more when you use them.

Unfortunately, our recent survey of major online dating sites found that most of them were not properly implementing HTTPS. Some online dating sites offer partial support for HTTPS, and some offer none at all. This leaves user data exposed. For example, when a user is on a shared network such as a library or coffee shop, she may be exposing sensitive data such as a username, chat messages, what pages she views and thus what profiles she is viewing , how she responds to questions, and more to an eavesdropper monitoring the wireless connection.

Even worse, poor security practices leave her vulnerable to having her entire account taken over by an attacker. See our in-depth post on OkCupid to learn more. In both the US and UK samples, dishonesty declined with age.

Maybe older people are just more interested in projecting their real self, rather than an imagined or ideal version. One of the big problems with online dating for women is that, although there are genuine relationship-seeking men on the sites, there are also plenty of guys on there simply looking for sex. Not quite, but it is full of unscrupulous vendors looking to separate you from your money by whatever means possible in other news, have you heard about the secret to getting killer abs in less than 7 minutes using this 1 weird trick…?

There are pitfalls and tripwires in every sphere of life, but this may be particularly true in the context of online dating.

It might even be advisable to follow these general guidelines:. If something feels off, trust your gut. Never mind the fact that more than one-third of all people who use online dating sites have never actually gone on a date with someone they met online , those that somehow do manage to find someone else they are willing to marry and who is willing to marry them a vanishingly tiny subset of online daters face an uphill battle. And it gets worse.

Couples who met online are nearly 3 times as likely to get divorced as couples that met face-to-face. According to the Association for Psychological Science, reviewing multiple candidates causes people to be more judgmental and inclined to dismiss a not-quite-perfect candidate than they otherwise would be in a face-to-face meeting.

Ryan Anderson, Ph. But who we end up becoming and how much we like that person are more in our control than we tend to think they are. Ryan Anderson Ph. The Mating Game. The Ugly Truth About Online Dating Are we sacrificing love for convenience? Posted September 6, Reviewed by Lybi Ma Share.

Research says one-third of all people who use online dating sites have never actually gone on a date with someone they met online. A study showed that reviewing multiple dating candidates online causes people to be more judgmental about them.

In the real world there is no such thing as a frictionless market, but some markets have more friction than others. Online markets reduce friction drastically in that they make the shopping part laughably easy.

Let me illustrate this point with an example that has nothing to do with dating. It is a deep dark secret of mine that I used to be a philatelist—yes, you can denigrate that fine hobby by calling it stamp collecting if you wish. I collected certain kinds of 19th-century postal history mailed envelopes and I used to enjoy travelling from dealer to dealer digging through bins of musty postal history looking for the items that I collected.

And then the Internet happened. Collecting postal history has gone from a labor of seeking out interesting shops and sales and digging through musty boxes to one of logging on to eBay, typing in a search request 19th-century postal history , and clicking on whatever envelope covers catch my eye.

The search process has for all practical purposes become frictionless, and the net result is that it just isn't fun anymore. My collection has been placed in a storage locker. I'm done with it. Now I realize that the economic language of frictionless markets isn't very romantic, but the fact is that the dating game is a kind of market whether we want to admit it or not. Finding a partner used to be expensive, and the market was inefficient.

If you lived in a large city, there were always people looking for partners, but the problem was how to find them.

Pick-up bars were imperfect markets to say the very least. Now you go online, select a partner, and you are immediately dating someone who is at least interested in you. Of course online dating is still work, but the emotional labor and risk of failure has been significantly reduced. Slater picks up on two unintended consequences of a low-friction dating market.

First, if it is too easy to find something you just don't value it as much. If diamonds grew on dandelions no one would care about diamonds. The other consequence is that it reduces the cost of moving on to something new. Not only is what you have less valuable, but trading for something new is less expensive as well.

It makes it too easy to find people, to ditch people, and most importantly, to date people who are similar to us. Dan Slater asks whether online dating leads us to value our relationships less and whether that is a problem. I agree that it's a problem, but it isn't the only problem. Or rather, it's just a small part of a bigger problem with online dating.

And the problem isn't really just a problem with online dating—it's a problem that extrudes from online markets in general: They lack sufficient friction, and paradoxically this is not a good thing.

A frictionless market is one that puts together buyer and seller without transaction costs. In the real world there is no such thing as a frictionless market, but some markets have more friction than others. Online markets reduce friction drastically in that they make the shopping part laughably easy. Let me illustrate this point with an example that has nothing to do with dating. It is a deep dark secret of mine that I used to be a philatelist—yes, you can denigrate that fine hobby by calling it stamp collecting if you wish.

I collected certain kinds of 19th-century postal history mailed envelopes and I used to enjoy travelling from dealer to dealer digging through bins of musty postal history looking for the items that I collected. And then the Internet happened. Collecting postal history has gone from a labor of seeking out interesting shops and sales and digging through musty boxes to one of logging on to eBay, typing in a search request 19th-century postal history , and clicking on whatever envelope covers catch my eye.

The search process has for all practical purposes become frictionless, and the net result is that it just isn't fun anymore. My collection has been placed in a storage locker. I'm done with it. Now I realize that the economic language of frictionless markets isn't very romantic, but the fact is that the dating game is a kind of market whether we want to admit it or not. Finding a partner used to be expensive, and the market was inefficient.

If you lived in a large city, there were always people looking for partners, but the problem was how to find them. Pick-up bars were imperfect markets to say the very least. Now you go online, select a partner, and you are immediately dating someone who is at least interested in you.

Of course online dating is still work, but the emotional labor and risk of failure has been significantly reduced. Slater picks up on two unintended consequences of a low-friction dating market. First, if it is too easy to find something you just don't value it as much. If diamonds grew on dandelions no one would care about diamonds. The other consequence is that it reduces the cost of moving on to something new. Not only is what you have less valuable, but trading for something new is less expensive as well.

Sure, there is the breakup drama, but online dating markets mean you won't have to suffer that drama sitting home watching sad movies; you can find a replacement within days. I agree that those are two of the problems with online dating markets, but they are really just the tip of the iceberg. Here is another problem that I consider to be more serious.

One advantage of inefficient dating markets is that in times of scarcity we sometimes take chances on things we wouldn't otherwise try. In times of plenty, we take the path of least resistence someone who appears compatible and we forgo difficult and prima facie implausible pairings. And this is our loss. We all understand this kind of romance—it involves the strange chemistry of putting together two people who are, on the face of it, incompatible.

Of course online dating services can randomize their matching algorithms to supply unlikely options—but these options are always served against a backdrop in which more likely options are plentiful, easy to obtain, and on the face of it less risky.

We need the scarcity to propel us to try the unlikely pairings. Much of what is valuable in this world is the product of mashing up ideas or music or personalities that are on the face of it incompatible. And the secret is that great chemistry for example in music isn't about putting together people who are on the same page—it is about putting together people who are different and making it work.

The result is often unexpected and beautiful. So it is with relationships; compatibility is a terrible idea in selecting a partner. It leads to stasis, both for individuals and for relationships and turning my music example into a metaphor it leads to music that is predictable and unexciting. There is a closely related point to be made here.

Online markets assume we know what we are looking for, but sometimes we simply don't know what we are looking for until we stumble across it in a search for something else.

Let me illustrate this point by another example from my embarrassing hobby of philately—this story explains how I came to collect 19th-century postal history. One day, as I was talking to a stamp dealer and asking him for something he didn't have, he pulled out of folder and of 19th-century envelopes and asked: What do you think of these? Within minutes my hobby and been radically transformed. My refocused hobby would never have come about in a low-friction market like eBay—I would have never even bothered to look at the postal history section.

It wasn't what I thought I was looking for. Inefficient markets are good because they lead us to look at new things and try new things. They help us to expand our horizons. A final thing: By reducing the cost of finding someone, online dating also makes it too easy to avoid being alone after a relationship fails. Most people don't want to be alone, but a traditional inefficient dating market made this an unavoidable reality for most people. Online dating markets are so low-friction that between-relationship dry periods can quickly evaporate.

But while online dating minimizes the heartache periods, minimizing those periods really doesn't do us any favors—we are losing periods of reflection when we might be thinking about what we did right and wrong, how we can improve as individuals, and what we might be open to next time. Much more could be said about the hidden costs of low-friction dating markets, but I think the general point can be boiled down to a basic point about the paradox of plenty: We often make our greatest discoveries and acquire our greatest treasures when local scarcity compels us to be open to new and better things.

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The example above draws her in and makes her want to learn more about you. The states they visit are health care sanctuaries. Imagine your very own Dream Team of highly skilled dating experts searching for the very best local matches, sparking their interest, and arranging all the dates for you. Others make tweaks so significant they come out as different people. There's a lot of discussion right now about how a federal privacy bill , the American Data Privacy Protection Act H.

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