Your online dating profile may not be as private as you think. The AshleyMadison.com hack showed that profiles could be exposed by hackers, but that is not the only privacy concern. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out some common privacy and security hazards with online dating, and suggests how you can protect yourself.
Your dating profile and photos may stay on the site long after you are no longer active. This makes it easy to pick up where you left off if a relationship doesn’t work out, but having your information continue to live on the dating site’s server means that it is subject to discovery in a legal case or illegally by hackers.
Photos may remain online long after you think you have deleted them or closed your account because many large websites host photos with Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Removing a photo from the main website doesn’t necessarily remove it from the CDN, so photos are may be rediscovered or even hacked in the future.
Before you sign up, read the site’s privacy policy to learn how they treat data of deleted profiles. Keep in mind that a privacy policy can change at any time, so what is true today could change tomorrow. If you decide to sign up for a dating site, consider taking a few steps to make it harder for a dating site to easily identify you. Get a throw-away email address and minimize the amount of personal information you provide on the site.
Your profile may be indexed by search engines. Although it is not true of every site, some sites make profiles public by default, and allow them to be shown in searches done in Google and other search engines. If you do not want your profile possibly showing up in random searches, check your privacy settings on the site and make sure your profile can only be viewed by other users of that site when they are logged in to their accounts.
Your pictures can identify you. Reverse image search on sites such as TinEye and Google Image Search makes it easy to find where photos have been used online. Users hoping to be anonymous may use false names and change details surrounding their identities, but that may not be enough. If you use a photo on a dating site that can be found on one of your other online accounts—for example, if it was shared on your Facebook or LinkedIn profile – then your real identity could be discovered. Consider using a profile photo that is unique to your dating profile.
Additionally, PrivacyRights.org points out that if photos have been geotagged they contain information that may pinpoint your location.
Data is mined by online marketers and used to sell things to you. These sites gather vast amounts of data from users (age, interests, ethnicity, religion, etc.), then sell the data to online marketers or affiliates. Although they may claim that your individual data is “anonymized” or sold in aggregate form, it has been shown that it’s hard to truly anonymize data. Read privacy policies and consider contacting the sites you use to clarify their practices and let them know your concerns.
Support for secure connections is lacking because HTTPS is not properly implemented. 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.
One way to protect yourself is by installing HTTPS Everywhere, a Firefox addon created and maintained jointly by EFF and the Tor Project. When you use Firefox, HTTPS Everywhere will automatically change URLs from HTTP to HTTPS on over a thousand sites.
Norton recommends the following precautions when setting up an online dating profile:
- Use a unique username that you have not used elsewhere so that your dating profile is not easily connected to other online profiles.
- Don’t use the same photo you use on other online profiles. Reverse image search can easily locate where else the photo is used.
- Set up a free email account to use with your dating account. Although most sites have in-site messaging to protect the anonymity of their members, people often shift conversations to personal email after connecting at the site.
- Set up a free Google Voice account with a unique phone number you can forward to your mobile. That way are not giving out your real phone number.
- Only use reputable, well-known dating websites. Research sites to determine their privacy policies and how they handle deleted or disabled accounts. Some dating sites make profiles public by default, which means that they can be indexed by search engines.
- Check the privacy policy to see how the service will handle your data.
- Join a paid site. Since members have to pay to communicate with each other, this means that there will be more legitimate daters and less scammers. Some of the paid sites also conduct criminal background screenings.
