The 3G Dating Agency’s Blog

Charles Arthur in the Guardian and Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC report on how Facebook is threatening the Daily Mail with legal action after a Daily Mail article by Mark Williams-Thomas suggesting the ease with which paedophiles can engage with minors on sites like Facebook that don’t offer proper age verification controls.

A Facebook UK Spokeswoman claimed: “The people at Facebook in the US were reading this and knew at once that it couldn’t have been our platform… …We have made Facebook much more favourable to the safety of minors – minors under 18 cannot receive messages from somebody over 18.”

I’ll make a promise to eat a copy of the Daily Mail (and post the video of me doing it on YouTube) if Facebook wins a legal case against the Daily Mail based on this. There’s not a judge in the land that they could convince that their “enter your date of birth” age verification process is robust enough to stop a paedophile from engaging with minors.

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:

A story on Mashable (the social media guide) discusses “ChatRoulette” a new “Random” Video Chat site that breaks a few of the principles that we’re trying to establish for Video Dating here at The 3G Dating Agency eg. an effective means of age verification and the moderation of stranger-stranger content.

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.

Engadget have got their hands on the Google Nexus One, Google’s rival to Apple’s iPhone and a nasty little stab in the back for their Android Platform partners.

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)?