Keyboard Canoodling: Think Your Online Dating Profile is Safe? Eh…Think Again!

Are you a fan of online dating? If so, you might want to read the following and make sure that the information you post on your profile isn’t ending up anywhere else. What are we talking about? The following story is pretty shocking…

The Daily Mail reports that after Jenny Beard’s marriage fell apart, she decided to go online and search for a new love. She was 42 years old and a single parent to her six-year-old son. Due to a demanding career, Jenny didn’t have much time to socialise, so like many women, she decided to set up an online dating profile on a website that was specifically aimed at single parents.

It all sounds relatively normal, right? But little did Jenny know that signing up for the website would actually turn into a major nightmare. In fact, Jenny’s experience was so bad that Channel 4 News interviewed her and her story will be on television tonight.

On her dating profile, Jenny described how she loved going to the theatre, walking in the country and stated that she wanted to meet like-minded men who understood how hard it was to be a single parent. But soon Jenny started receiving abusive and explicit emails from men who weren’t even members of the dating website.

Make sure you read the small print when it comes to setting up an online dating profile

What was going on? Well Jenny’s picture and all her information had been posted on various lads’ magazine sites, alongside glamour models and women in semi-pornographic poses.

What Jenny didn’t know when she signed up for her single parent dating website was the fact that it was run by a parent company known as Global Personals – a company which passes members’ details freely between the 7,500 websites that it owns. This means that people like Jenny end up being inundated with spam and unwanted advances.

The company also creates ‘fake’ dating profiles by stealing other people’s pictures and orders their staff to flirt with members of their dating websites and to trick them into renewing their subscriptions.

“Internet dating seemed the best way of meeting people,” said Jenny, speaking about her ordeal.

“But I’m shocked by how many sites I’ve ended up on. It’s upsetting and annoying,” she added.

Disturbingly enough, the deceitful practices of Global Personals is perfectly legal (yeah, we couldn’t get over this either!). According to reports, it’s known as ‘white-labelling’ and occurs when a product produced by one company is rebranded by other companies that the main company owns.

What do you think ladies? Would stories like these cause you to rethink your online dating profile, if you have one?