Adam Shostack has “cluechick” in as a guestblogger at Emergent Chaos to provide some thoughts on background checks for on-line dating.

As I would expect of anyone whom Adam would let put words on his site, she gets it:

Finally, and perhaps the biggest issue, to my eyes, is the possibility that people will use this sort of thing instead of common sense tools like their brains and hearts. Yes, a background check might pull up some tidbit of information that I might otherwise never know, but it can’t tell me that my newfound love is the person I want him to be. A lack of data, after all, is not necessarily a positive finding.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the readers of the original article probably won’t.

I’ve written previously about both risk homeostasis, of which this is a perfect example, and even specifically about background checks and online dating.

From the original article, “Dinner, Movie — and a Background Check — for Online Daters“:

Kimberly Hall was twice betrayed by men she met dating online. Both turned out to be married.

So she started doing background checks on her dates using a Web site called Intelius. Now, the 33-year-old from Laurel is engaged to a man she met on Blackplanet.com, but even he had to undergo record checks.

“He wasn’t happy” about doing it, Hall said of her fiance. But eventually he turned over his Social Security number.

I’ll bet he wasn’t, given that in the United States, the SSN is still the golden key to access someone’s potential lines of credit. Someone has probably already figured out that they can use a demand for this information as the source of inputs to commit full-fledged identity fraud. It’s an emotionally loaded demand, so it will probably work. Then, the scammer can break off the relationship for something that was allegedly found in the check. It’s the worst security of all: Insecurity in the name of security.

First off, if you’re going to let the presence of countermeasures increase your inherent risk tolerance, you’d better be sure that the countermeasure is actually effective at reducing your residual risk back to the desired level. Unfortunately, the various background checks and other offerings from the “dating security industry” tell you, at best, whether or not this person has been caught yet. Consider the average data quality in a background check database, and you should realize it probably can’t even do that.

As to the idea that a background check can keep someone safe? Puh-leeze. People with Top Secret clearances, which are a whole hell of a lot more invasive than a credit & criminal database check commit every kind of crime from murder to espionage to bestiality in front of their friends without getting caught for years. The whole dating security industry is nothing more than another way to separate fools from their money.

The only reasonable suggestion in the whole article is MatchTalk, and it’s just an extension of the core model, not a security feature at all:

Since November, Match.com has gotten more than 500,000 members to test its MatchTalk feature, which uses Jangl’s technology. The service asks for members to enter their phone numbers into the Web site, which generates a phone number that can be used to make calls between the two dating prospects without disclosing their actual numbers. The service is temporary: A couple can give up the temporary number if they get serious or if they call it quits.

TalkMatch was already on the drawing board by the time I left Match, and I thought it was an interesting idea. I took the position that it would be good for revenue, since we thought people would want it (and it sounds like they do from the numbers), but bad from an information quality perspective since we would lose the ability to do any more than “he-said-she-said” investigation, which we already did enough of even when people sent us transcripts of email conversations.*

Extending the online dating business model from E-mail to IM to Voice fills a real gap in the process, allowing people to get a feel for a person’s real-life timing and presence before they actually meet face-to-face. If the person comes off as creepy on the phone, then the real risk–an in-person encounter going horribly wrong–has been avoided, and that’s a good thing.

So the reporter found some woman in Texas who accidentally dated a murderer. I googled for 10 seconds and found a Houston TV station who invited a convicted rapist to an on-air speed dating event.

What we should all remember at times like this is that the plural of anecdote is not data. Data is what you get when you have a population of almost 20 million people, over a million of them paying you money in any given month to talk to one another, and every time someone gets hurt, you or your staff have to do the research.

The answer is, quite simply, that we had a lower risk of violent crime among our members than the average person looking for love in a bar. Maybe that was because our customers weren’t looking for love while drunk, but that certainly can’t have hurt. Our demographic was divorcee’s and thirty-somethings who had never married. As a result, our customers tended to be older and thus less likely to commit crimes, period. This may have changed since I left, since the college and twenty-something crowd was being marketed to quite heavily, but my data was that snapshot in time.

Now that’s not to say all was sweetness and light–after all, they paid me and my team for a reason–but on the product security side, we spent a lot more time dealing with (in descending order of frequency):

• people using our system as a marketing channel for either a competing dating site or porn. If done correctly, it was less than 1/10th the cost for a much better set of prospects than any email address list you could buy. If done fraudulently, it was essentially free.
• phishing for member accounts for use in above marketing fraud
• people attempting to commit fraud targeting our customers (e.g. 419 and other advance-fee stuff, Russian Bride scams)
• Subpoena requests in divorce proceedings
• credit card chargebacks or fraud complaints to the police, often attempts by cheating spouses to explain away the presence of match.com charges on their credit card statement

That’s not to say that we didn’t have violent crimes or con games between people who met on the site, but I can guarantee that it was a lot less than in a city of equivalent size.

* we did not store or archive message bodies, only subject lines at the time–I have no idea what they do or don’t archive now.

I am married and let us say that I went into a bar known as a pick up for singles. Do I have to have a background check before being admitted? Answer, no.
The women that met two married men online, I would like to know in real life how many married men she had dated without knowing they were married. I would hazard a guess that the ratio is around the same.
Like any other dating there are dangers and although to some sensible precautions make common sense. To others they go without considering the consequences.
It is for this reason that I have in my forum an area for those that have had bad experience with online dating to tell others.
This also will help me formulate guide lines to help keeping men and women safe.

Chandler, you said:

… the ability to do any more than “he-said-she-said” investigation, which we already did enough of even when people sent us transcripts of email conversations.*

Could you say more about how you established jurisdiction and the process of dispute resolution?

Dating RIsk…

How long before some dating service that does background checks and reveals them to members before dating gets sued bigtime?…

Same as any other thing that’s good, there’s always the bad. Remember the ff before you decide to go for online dating:be honest, be careful, e decision-wise, don’t go “overboard” and be polite.

It’s just more politically correct scaremongering to get money out of people.

Guys lie about being married because women make such an issue out of it. I doubt many guys would overly care if the woman stroking their thigh was married or not. It’s only our social structure that gives the female perspective moral high ground. As a species that strucure is hardly suitable for us hence the conflict.