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How Public Is My Private Life?: Privacy in Online Dating

Published: 03 April 2017 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Online dating services let users expand their dating pool beyond their social network and specify important characteristics of potential partners. To assess compatibility, users share personal information -- e.g., identifying details or sensitive opinions about sexual preferences or worldviews -- in profiles or in one-on-one communication. Thus, participating in online dating poses inherent privacy risks. How people reason about these privacy risks in modern online dating ecosystems has not been extensively studied. We present the results of a survey we designed to examine privacy-related risks, practices, and expectations of people who use or have used online dating, then delve deeper using semi-structured interviews. We additionally analyzed 400 Tinder profiles to explore how these issues manifest in practice. Our results reveal tensions between privacy and competing user values and goals, and we demonstrate how these results can inform future designs.

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    Cited By

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      Published In

      cover image ACM Other conferences
      WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web
      April 2017
      1678 pages
      ISBN:9781450349130

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      • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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      International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee

      Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

      Publication History

      Published: 03 April 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. human values
      2. information disclosure
      3. online dating
      4. privacy
      5. security

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      WWW '17
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      WWW '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 966 submissions, 17%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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      • (2024)Evaluating Privacy & Security of Online Dating Applications with a Focus on Older AdultsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4828190Online publication date: 2024
      • (2024)It’s a (Mis)match: Practices and Perceptions of University Students About Online DatingSocial Computing and Social Media10.1007/978-3-031-61281-7_17(250-265)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
      • (2023)Seeking Love and Companionship through Streaming: Unpacking Livestreamer-moderated Senior Matchmaking in ChinaProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581195(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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      • (2022)“So Close, yet So Far”: Exploring Sexual-minority Women’s Relationship-building via Online Dating in ChinaProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517624(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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      • (2022)SoK: Social Cybersecurity2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833757(1863-1879)Online publication date: May-2022
      • (2021)Saudi Arabian Parents' Perception of Online Marital Matchmaking TechnologiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34329104:CSCW3(1-32)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2021
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