Popular online dating services allow you to find a soulmate and also reveal your personal pictures, phone numbers, and even your location to hackers, scammers, and shady people.
I Want to Find a Soulmate: Where to Look for?
The most popular dating platforms are Badoo, Mamba, Ladadate, and Tinder. To work with each of these services, the user has to register, create a personal account, fill out the fields in the questionnaire and upload pictures. It would seem — nothing complicated, but only for those who do not think about the safety of their personal data.
How to Protect Matches and Swipes: Five Rules
There are several ways to protect your personal data, pictures, correspondence, and also not to reveal your identity in your dating service account:
1. The first danger is that dating apps allow users to sync their accounts with pages on social networks. As soon as the service gains access to your profile on a third-party site, it has the opportunity to learn a little more about you: where you live, work, study, how old you are, etc. Even if your real name and place of study are the only published information, it is easy to use this information to find you on other sites. For instance, on job search pages, where your CV and a bunch of details about your personal life are.
2. Never upload pictures that you already use on social media. The new SearchFace service, which uses face recognition technology, is also capable of helping hackers find your profiles. Anyone can upload your photo to this site and find pictures from social networks. You can deceive the service using non-standard photos: try posing so that half of your face is off-screen, in shadow, or just covered by your hand. This way, a potential partner will be able to assess your appearance from the picture but will not be able to use it against you.
3. Keep your phone number a secret until the very end. If the online conversation goes well, then, in the end, users exchange numbers for closer communication. This is luck and a pitfall since the interlocutor will be able to find your profiles on social networks and messengers if they are tied to the number.
4. Don’t forget to check your location settings. In the end, you still have to reveal where you are, but it will be better if the process becomes controlled. Disable GPS tracking in your smartphone options and prevent websites and applications from determining your address in the background.
5. You should not hide information about yourself in one application while all information is available in another. Using multiple dating sites and services at once increases your chances of finding a soulmate but jeopardizes your personal safety. Don’t forget to control each of your profiles and make sure that they all tell potential partners exactly as much as you think is necessary.
Deleting the App Alone is Not Enough
Let’s say you decide to say goodbye to a profile on a dating app forever. There is a high probability of making the most popular mistake of users: uninstalling the application and deciding that your account has now also been erased from the network. But this is not the case, and for the final deactivation of the profile, you have to delete accounts exclusively in the application.
