Yes the camera can lie, remove the element of surprise and play safe by enjoying a 3G Video Date first…

In a week where there have been 2 murders of innocent young women in the UK reported that were facilitated by the open social networking site Facebook the company is preparing to add location data into the mix…

It’s terrible to have to admit it but things are going to get worse before they get better…

Until people start voting with their feet and choosing communities in which baldy old men can’t pose as hunky youngsters..

On this blog I regularly discuss the privacy issues that are posed by community sites that require members to expose their personal details. I do this because singles who use dating sites are often very vulnerable to these threats and because my company (The 3G Dating Agency) has been designed to offer a safer alternative by enabling members to communicate openly but without the need to reveal anything but a screen name until they feel comfortable revealing their personal details.

A new website called “Please Rob Me” has been built to show how people who are tweeting their location exactly how careless they are being.

“The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face”

The goal of the website is to raise awareness of this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. “Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information”

Here are a few examples:

The Mashable article discusses a Vimeo Video produced by Casey Neistat that talks of how interesting it is to connect with others, and “especially women” over video but it also reveals how the open nature of the service has led to audiences that are “71% Male, 15% Female and 14% Pervert” even at 4pm in the afternoon on a working day.

Referring to the “Chatroulette” service as a “sensation” and “all the rage lately” I think they’re being very irresponsible, naive and ignorant of the safety issues at play here. Paedophiles have very sophisticated warped minds and are going to be increasingly abusing the access this gives them to minors. Kids everywhere deserve to be protected from it.

The website (www.chatroulette.com) is definitely not content appropriate for work – unless you’re a registered law enforcement officer looking to catch some paedophiles and/or inform minors of the risks they’re exposing themselves to.

If you share my concerns please join me and make a report to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and the Internet Watch Foundation now. I’ll update this post with any (publishable) feedback I get from the authorities with regard to my enquiry.

With 1 in 3 partners admitting to secretly snooping a look at their partners SMS’s, I guess it’s not the safest way for any would be cheats to communicate. But what if you’ve never sent or received a text and you have no interest in cheating, surely then it must be safe to think you have nothing to worry about, right?

Wrong!

Mellissa Martin with the Winnipeg Free Press reports on how a Virgin Mobile/Samsung initiative to help make it easier to send racy text messages has led to the break up of Darren P.’s relationship after his partner (of two and a half years) found the following preinstalled messages:

We hope the person at Virgin Mobile or Samsung who’s rather thoughtless actions have led to this break up can do the right thing and step in with an apology and help get the couple back together. Failing that at least they could give the guy a 3G Video Mobile so that he could get his life back together and safely meet with some new friends at The 3G Dating Agency – where our secure mobile website will also ensure any racy messaging threads he does actually write will remain private and protected by password.

Although there isn’t much detail the pictures reveal that it’s going to feature a QR Code printed on the back of the casing. I’ve been talking for years about how useful this could be and how it could lead to some really cool device brand loyalty.

Here’s how:

1) Give every handset it’s own short URL (in the same way you give it an IMEI) and print this on the casing.
2) Also give the user a couple of extra QR Code stickers (they can stick them one on their bedroom wall and another in their car for safe keeping)
3) Host a blank mobilized webpage for every handset and bookmark it within the mobiles web browser.
4) Let users visit this webpage (by snapping the QR Code or visiting the bookmark) and personalise it (like they would with a printed business card) by adding their Name, Website, Business image etc. and supporting the hosting of their VCard for downloading.
5) Enable security by setting the devices IMEI as a one time password (which needs to be changed on first visit)
6) Offer a secure “backup my phone content & contacts” application in conjunction with this URL and the new password.

Imagine now you lose your phone, it falls in a bath of water or you just want to upgrade your old phone. Simply get a new phone, capture the QR Code (by simply capturing the QR Code on your bedroom wall, off the casing of your broken/old phone), then enter your password, hey pesto you’re back up and running with all your restored content.

Imagine now you meet someone at a conference. Simply picture the QR Code on the back of their phone and a VCard is immediately stored on your mobile. No need for fiddling about with InfraRed beams, texting your VCard, or finding their bluetooth name, authorising access, setting a password etc. simply point your cameraphone at the back of their phone, snap the QR Code, visit the website and you have it all there.

Hey why just one QR Code? …how about one for business (featuring a link to your LinkedIn profile) and one for more informal social needs (featuring a link to your facebook profile)?

The swashbuckling founder (pictured) is claiming that “chubby members” who have got ‘too fat’ for its books needed to be exiled democratically after letting themselves go over the festive period and becoming “a direct threat to our business model”. Apparently it had been “forced” to act by “gluttonous members” in the US, UK and Canada who had revealed the scale of their yuletide overindulgence in pictures they posted online since Christmas.

So please tell me if I’m not getting this right… BeautifulPeople.com is a online community that has no possible way of ensuring the photo you have submitted is in any way genuine, and it has got a problem with members who are unnecessarily updating their stored photo profiles with new photos of them looking “chubby”?

Doesn’t really add up to me…. can anyone else explain why a member of such a vanity community would do this?

The Daily Mail has a report on how Shane Symington from Portsmouth has sank into depression and debt after handing over £130,000 in an internet scam involving Nigerian fraudsters on MySpace who duped him by pretending to be a stunningly pretty American woman named ‘Angela Gates’.

The scurilous fraudsters even continued with the scam after he realised the deception by tricking him into engaging with a bogus FBI website which tricked more money out of him in order to pay legal expenses and the cost for agents to retrieve his lost money.

He said: ‘I feel sick from it all, I feel disillusioned, they have just played on my good nature. I’ve lost my life-savings, I have two loans and credit card debts, I’m in huge debts because of all of this…. …Before this happened, I used to go out every night, now I just stay in because I’ve lost all the self-confidence in my life and I don’t have the money to go out any more. I’ve also had five weeks off with depression from work… …It’s just wicked people getting everything they can get out of people… …You just can’t trust anyone on the internet. I want to warn people but I know I won’t be the last to fall for something like this.’

Detective Constable Jon Knox, of Hampshire Police, added: ‘This is a very sad situation, and this man has now parted with a huge sums of money through his own good nature – in trying to help others and then to recover some of what he had lost… …We do not want anyone else to fall foul of this kind of shocking activity and I would warn anyone who is asked for money over the internet by people they do not know to refuse and not put yourself at risk.’

Be sure to avoid Online Scammers by joining The 3G Dating Agency – our fully moderated community of validated members prevents scammers even contacting you and because every member has a 3G Video Mobile you can be sure for yourself that everyone is real!

The “CHLOE31″ profile boasted that she was “just sexy n cute”, “single n looking for a guy who wil love me for fun date n sex lol”. Our moderators got suspicious when we saw that “CHLOE31″ was advertising the 35338 premium short code that belongs to the “Mobile Date Channel” (http://www.mobiledatechannel.com) and charges approximately $2 per message recieved.

One more check of the IP address and it was obvious this scam was an attempt to place a free advert for the Mobile Date Channel, run by Toronto VoC0Mo Inc (http://vocomo.ca) who is partnered with brands including “Mobile Hookup txt.talk.date” (mobilehookup.net), “Heart2Heart Mobile” (h2hmobile.com) and “Quest Mobile” (questmobilechat.com)

As another scam profile bites the dust… the team here at The 3G Dating Agency would like to wish you a safe, scam free, happy and successful 2010!

The Press Association reports that Police are investigating a complaint from ex-Atomic Kitten singer Kerry Katona that she was stalked by an online friend she befriended on Facebook who visited her mansion home in Cheshire unannounced. Katona, 29, was told by police investigating the matter to be more wary of privacy issues while sharing sensitive personal information on open social networking websites.