Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Acquisti, A., Gross, R.: Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook. In: Danezis, G., Golle, P. (eds.) PET 2006. LNCS, vol. 4258, pp. 36–58. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Acquisti, A., Gross, R.: Predicting Social Security numbers from public data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(27), 10975–10980 (2009)
Badoo. Social Lives Vs Social Networks (2012), http://corp.badoo.com/lv/entry/press/53/
Boyd, D., Ellison, N.B.: Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1), 210–230 (2007)
Brym, R., Lenton, R.: Love online: A report on digital dating in Canada. MSN. ca (February 6, 2001)
Byrne, C.: Users do care about location privacy (2011), http://www.venturebeat.com/2011/04/21/smartphone-users-location-privacy/
Camp, L.J.: Designing for trust. In: Falcone, R., Barber, S.K., Korba, L., Singh, M.P. (eds.) AAMAS 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2631, pp. 15–29. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Cao, Q., Sirivianos, M., Yang, X., Pregueiro, T.: Aiding the Detection of Fake Accounts in Large-scale Social Online Services. In: USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (2012)
Cavoukian, A.: S. U. S. of Law, C. S. C. for Computers, and Law. Privacy by design. Stanford Law School (2010)
Couch, D., Liamputtong, P.P.: Online dating and mating: Perceptions of risk and health among online users. Health, Risk & Society 9(3), 275–294 (2007)
Current Online Dating and Dating Services Facts & Statistics (2012), http://preview.tinyurl.com/254pum6
De Cristofaro, E., Tsudik, G.: Practical private set intersection protocols with linear complexity. In: Sion, R. (ed.) FC 2010. LNCS, vol. 6052, pp. 143–159. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Dourish, P., Grinter, R., Delgado de la Flor, J., Joseph, M.: Security in the wild: user strategies for managing security as an everyday, practical problem. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 8(6), 391–401 (2004)
Ellison, N., Heino, R., Gibbs, J.: Managing Impressions Online: Self-Presentation Processes in the Online Dating Environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(2), 415–441 (2006)
Fahl, S., Harbach, M., Muders, T., Smith, M., Sander, U.: Helping Johnny 2.0 to encrypt his Facebook conversations. In: Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, p. 11 (2012)
Felt, A., Evans, D.: Privacy protection for social networking APIs. In: Web 2.0 Security and Privacy (2008)
Gibbs, J., Ellison, N., Lai, C.: First comes love, then comes Google: An investigation of uncertainty reduction strategies and self-disclosure in online dating. Communication Research 38(1), 70–100 (2011)
Goldman, D.: Facebook tops 900 million users (2012), http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/23/technology/facebook-q1/index.htm
Goo, S.K.: Explaining Facebook’s Spam Prevention Systems (2010), http://preview.tinyurl.com/23gmv7r
Goo, S.K.: Facebook: A Profile of its ‘Friends’ (2012), http://preview.tinyurl.com/7hfpgjj
Gross, R., Acquisti, A.: Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. In: ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, pp. 71–80 (2005)
Huang, D.-L., Rau, P.-L.P., Salvendy, G.: A survey of factors influencing people’s perception of information security. In: Jacko, J.A. (ed.) HCI 2007. LNCS, vol. 4553, pp. 906–915. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Jagatic, T., Johnson, N., Jakobsson, M., Menczer, F.: Social phishing. Communications of the ACM 50(10), 94–100 (2007)
Kittur, A., Chi, E., Suh, B.: Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk. In: SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 453–456 (2008)
Liu, D., Camp, L.: Proof of work can work. In: Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (2006)
Motahari, S., Ziavras, S., Schuler, R., Jones, Q.: Identity inference as a privacy risk in computer-mediated communication. In: International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 1–10 (2009)
Murayama, Y., Hikage, N., Hauser, C., Chakraborty, B., Segawa, N.: An Anshin Model for the Evaluation of the Sense of Security. In: Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2006)
Nissenbaum, H.: Protecting privacy in an information age: The problem of privacy in public. Law and Philosophy 17(5), 559–596 (1998)
OAuth 2.0, http://oauth.net/
OpenID, http://openid.net/
Paolacci, G., Chandler, J., Ipeirotis, P.: Running Experiments On Amazon Mechanical Turk. Judgment and Decision Making 5(5), 411–419 (2010)
Protalinski, E.: How to spot a fake Facebook profile (2012), http://preview.tinyurl.com/87hmqyr
Richman, W., Kiesler, S., Weisband, S., Drasgow, F.: A meta-analytic study of social desirability distortion in computer-administered questionnaires, traditional questionnaires, and interviews. Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5), 754–775 (1999)
Rosenfeld, M., Thomas, R.: Searching for a Mate The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary. American Sociological Review 77(4), 523–547 (2012)
Ryan, T., Mauch, G.: Getting in bed with Robin Sage. In: Black Hat Conference (2010)
Sasse, M., Brostoff, S., Weirich, D.: Transforming the weakest link – Human/Computer Interaction Approach to Usable and Effective Security. BT Technology Journal 19(3), 122–131 (2001)
Schneier, B.: Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World. Springer (2003)
Sirivianos, M., Kim, K., Gan, J.W., Yang, X.: Assessing the veracity of identity assertions via osns. In: 2012 Fourth International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), pp. 1–10. IEEE (2012)
Toma, C., Hancock, J., Ellison, N.: Separating fact from fiction: An examination of deceptive self-presentation in online dating profiles. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(8), 1023–1036 (2008)
Wang, Y., Norcie, G., Komanduri, S., Acquisti, A., Leon, P., Cranor, L.: I regretted the minute I pressed share: A qualitative study of regrets on Facebook. In: Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (2011)
Whitten, A., Tygar, J.: Why Johnny can’t encrypt: A usability evaluation of PGP 5.0. In: USENIX Security Symposium (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Norcie, G., De Cristofaro, E., Bellotti, V. (2013). Bootstrapping Trust in Online Dating: Social Verification of Online Dating Profiles. In: Adams, A.A., Brenner, M., Smith, M. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7862. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41320-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41320-9_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41319-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41320-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)