Legal

The Daily Yomiuri Online has an article called "NPA targets online dating sites / Agency wants stricter regulations as current law being ignored". The Japanese National Police Agency wants tougher regulations regarding prohibiting minors under the age of 18 from using dating services. They have found currently this regulation is largely being ignored. In a suggested revised law, dating site operators would need to take measures to confirm a member's age, such as requiring users to fax copies of ID certificates to dating site operators. There are a few other proposed changes mentioned as well for the current internet dating regulations in Japan.

All matchmaking services in Shanghai must register with the Shanghai Association of Matchmaking Management by next year. Among other things, the association will keep track of any misdemeanors of the matchmaker service.

Each employee who works at a matchmaking service must obtain two certificates from the Shanghai Association of Matchmaking Management. One is a qualified matchmaking certificate and the second one is a matchmaking company employee certificate.

More information on the new regulations can be found at Shanghai Daily.

The New Jersey Assembly Committee has passed the next measure that would require dating services to tell residents of New Jersey whether criminal background checks are done.

Most singles dating online are honest but it's that 1% everyone worries about. Background checks don't tell the whole story and probably give online daters a false sense of security. A fair number of states have considered a bill similar to this but, one state has yet to pass it. The biggest problem with these type of checks is that most singles who have a criminal background would just give a false name to circumvent this type of security measure. A dating site would have to confirm that a member is actually who he or she says he or she is before an actual background check can be done. Confirming ones identity for websites is a whole other problem.

More information about this bill is located at the NewsCenter 16 website.

Yahoo! Personals has decided to settle with Robert Anthony from a lawsuit reported late last year. Robert claimed he was a victim of a "date baiting" by Yahoo which Yahoo! Personals has denied completely. Yahoo decided to settle to prevent a long drawn out case which would obviously result in bad press.

A couple of good things have come out of this settlement. The first one being inactive profiles of more than 120 days will be removed from the system. This should have been standard procedure for Yahoo from day one. A few of the larger dating services (like Match) already do this. Why waste customer's time and frustrate them by allowing them to try to contact someone who hasn't been online dating for a while. Yahoo will also keep the ability of users to report bad behaviour and suspicious profiles along with the ability of when the user cancels there paid membership they can have there profile deleted.

I saw this article called "Dating websites rebuked for promoting sex trade" on China Daily reporting that 12 dating websites are accused of being a cover for prostitution. No personals sites are named but apparently they are very graphic and lists pricing and contact information of the prostitutes.

I thought this article was relevant to our reviews site since I just added a second Asian dating site called Asia FriendFinder. The Asian dating services I have reviewed here are in no way involved in this type of thing.