Is Your Private Life Really Private When You're Dating Online? (Part II)

We've already talked about HTTPS encryption and the potential for security breaches on online dating Web sites, but there's plenty more to learn about privacy and online dating.

What happens if you meet your match and are ready to leave online dating behind? Or if you decide to take a hiatus in favor of trying your luck offline? Or if you get tired of online dating altogether? You can just delete your profile and all that information will disappear, right?

Nope.

In "Six Heartbreaking Truths About Online Dating Privacy," the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that dating sites have an incentive to keep users' personal information instead of purging it. The user may return to the site, or their information may be a source of a little extra cash when it's sold to data aggregation companies (which, Tana Ganeva notes on AlterNet, it generally is).

"The operators of these sites cull vast amounts of data from users (age, interests, ethnicity, religion, etc.), then package it up and lend or sell the data to online marketers or affiliates," says the EFF report. one dating site was caught red-handed doing exactly that, without even attempting to make it anonymous. Lokame, a company that packages user data for advertisers, purchased a bundle of private information from the dating site, like "education levels, religion, whether the user had kids or pets, and how often they drink and smoke."

And guess what? It's not just advertisers who are eager to get their hands on that kind of intell. "How would that Ashley Madison adultery account play during a nasty divorce?" muses Tana Ganeva. Savvy daters should be aware of their sites' privacy policies and have a full understanding what the site would do if faced with a subpoena or court order. Users should also note that, though a site may promise not release information for a subpoena, it can't legally protect the data fully.

And no, that's not all. There are many other simple ways that info you think is private can suddenly find itself in the public sphere. "Photos from Web sites can end up in Google Image search," writes Ganeva, "revealing the identity of a user trying to stay anonymous by using a psuedonym (increasing advances in facial recognition technology will make it easier and easier for a person's identity to be ascertained with just a picture)."

Choose what you share wisely, because just about anyone could find your personal data from a dating site.

Related Article: Is Your Private Life Really Private When You're Dating Online?