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posted by chromas on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the whoops dept.

The Verge reports that Match.com reactivated a bunch of old profiles, without asking. This raises many concerns about user data for those that might have missed the Facebook discussions recently.

[...] A Match Group spokesperson confirmed that a “limited number” of old accounts had been accidentally reactivated recently and that any account affected received a password reset. Match.com’s current privacy statement, which was last updated in 2016, says that the company can “retain certain information associated with your account” even after you close it. But that Match Group spokesperson also told The Verge that the company plans to roll out a new privacy policy “in the next month or so,” in order to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); under the new policy, all those years-old accounts will be deleted. The Verge has requested clarification on which accounts will qualify for deletion, and what “deletion” will specifically entail, but has not received a response as of press time.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:56AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:56AM (#672021) Journal

    Match has done this sort of crap before-- keep old profiles to boost their numbers, and other dirty tricks to drag things out and collect more money. Like, sending teaser messages just as a member is leaving. Naturally they have to re-up to read the message.

    Was it an accident like Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction"?

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @09:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @09:04AM (#672092)

    Match has done this sort of crap before-- keep old profiles to boost their numbers, and other dirty tricks to drag things out and collect more money. Like, sending teaser messages just as a member is leaving.

    Many, many moons ago in a previous^^3 job....

    Part of my job as postmaster@ was to block both the usual UBE/UCE and email of a category that, as my boss put it, 'would bring the organisation's name into disrepute¹', and this is where the online dating scammers come into this story. A set of general 'catchall' filter rules on the MTAs started trapping a number of messages indicating that some people were using their organisation email address to sign up to these sites, stupid, very very stupid, so an experiment was carried out to prove a point.

    Two identical profiles were created on a certain online dating site, the only differences being the names and the email addresses used (both created specifically for this task, one being a generic user@hotmail and the other being a bogus.user@our.organisation) we then sat back and watched.

    Long story short, over several months the bogus.user@our.organisation got far more responses, and, significantly, a lot more UCE/UBE.

    Bear in mind, that the only place these email addresses had been used were on this site, the conclusion being that the @our.organisation email address was more 'valuable' to this lot and scored higher on their search algorithms, so after throwing the information upstairs for the PHBs to mull, the edict went out to all and sundry that if you want to use these services, use a throwaway or personal email account, and not the one the organisation provided for work related use.

    Coda: several months after this episode, a gentle reminder was sent out to a number of people that all phone calls to-fro outside the organisation were recorded², and that the phones were provided for work related use, this might have had something to do with one of the direct-dial extensions being publicly visible on a BDSM dating site, and it didn't take a genius to find out where this number was geographically located and to what organisation it belonged (indeed, was found by one of the security wonks who'd been doing online searches on the primary part of the organisation's phone number as part of another matter, then one thing led to another³...)

    ¹ The organisation was (and still is) *very* touchy about it's public image, and has attack lawyers to spare who'd quite happily savage 'internal' threats with the same 'gusto' they'd employ on external ones.
    ² They probably were, my previous^^2 job had several rack mounted 1" multi-track Reel-to-Reel voice loggers on the telephone exchange.
    ³ In this case, they were less worried about the 'gutter press' getting hold of the information than the people ('..other matter..') they were then worried about.