Online dating is an increasingly thriving business which boasts billion-dollar revenues and attracts users in the tens of millions. Notwithstanding its popularity, online dating is not impervious to worrisome trust and privacy concerns raised by the disclosure of potentially sensitive data as well as the exposure to self-reported (and thus potentially misrepresented) information. Nonetheless, little research has, thus far, focused on how to enhance privacy and trustworthiness. In this paper, we report on a series of semi-structured interviews involving 20 participants, and show that users are significantly concerned with the veracity of online dating profiles. To address some of these concerns, we present the user-centered design of an interface, called Certifeye, which aims to bootstrap trust in online dating profiles using existing social network data. Certifeye verifies that the information users report on their online dating profile (e.g., age, relationship status, and or photos) matches that displayed on their own Facebook profile. Finally, we present the results of a 161-user Mechanical Turk study assessing whether our veracity-enhancing interface successfully reduced concerns in online dating users and find a statistically significant trust increase.
Philosophical and legal theories of privacy have long recognized the relationship between privacy and information about persons. They have, however, focused on personal, intimate, and sensitive information, assuming that with public information, and information drawn from public spheres, either privacy norms do not apply, or applying privacy norms is so burdensome as to be morally and legally unjustifiable. Against this preponderant view, I argue that information and communications technology, by facilitating surveillance, by vastly enhancing the collection, storage, and analysis of information, by enabling profiling, data mining and aggregation, has significantly altered the meaning of public information. As a result, a satisfactory legal and philosophical understanding of a right to privacy, capable of protecting the important values at stake in protecting privacy, must incorporate, in addition to traditional aspects of privacy, a degree of protection for privacy in public.