Online daters of the world, you can relax a little: there’ll soon be less likelihood that your new crush will turn out to be a registered sex offender in his or her spare time. That’s because Match.com will soon start screening its members against the national sex offender registry, following a lawsuit from a user who claimed she was raped by someone she met through the site.
The lawsuit established that the accused has six convictions for sexual battery, something that would understandably lower someone’s attractiveness if listed as part of their online profile. As a result, Match.com has made the decision to implement this new screening process – a process company president Mandy Ginsberg isn’t ready to hang her hat on, as this quote she offered to the Associated Press demonstrates:
We’ve been advised that a combination of improved technology and an improved database now enables a sufficient degree of accuracy to move forward with this initiative, despite its continued imperfection. We want to stress that while these checks may help in certain instances, they remain highly flawed, and it is critical that this effort does not provide a false sense of security to our members.
There’s “plausible deniability,” and then there’s this, which stops just short of “Look, we might miss a rapist or three, but you know, you shouldn’t really make any decisions based on us looking out for you anyway because we’re really unreliable.”
The screening process should go live on Match.com within the next three months. Still unknown: whether other dating sites will follow suit.
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