Weeding out the bad eggsMany people are still afraid of online dating because of the potential to meet undesirable people: sexual deviants, scammers, pedophiles, married passing off as singles, men passing off as women… the list is endless. But there is something sites can do to reduce the number of bad eggs in their membership, and more and more sites are doing it these days. Enter Iovation’s Reputation Manager. In their own words: “iovation ReputationManager™ is the only industry solution that tells you the history of fraud and abuse associated with each unique device.” Popular with financial services and online gaming, the Reputation Manager has also become useful for online dating sites, since it allows them to weed out users with a history of abuse. The reputation manager has 32 categories of undesirable activities (such as chargeback, spam, and multiple accounting) so online dating sites can be aware if a user has a history of any of those activities. Another positive aspect of the Reputation Manager is that users may choose to share information on undesirable activity, so that if for example a user was caught spamming at Date.com he or she will be flagged and possibly not even be allowed to create an account in eHarmony.com, as the previous record of infraction is made available to all sites using the system. This is made possible thanks to Iovation’s “device print,” a way to identify a user’s computer so they may not use it again for unlawful or improper purposes within the member sites. Greg Pierson, Iovation’s CEO, explained that the “device print” can be created with minimal disturbance to the user and without downloading any software onto their computer: “This isn’t a matter of looking at some small number of relatively unique identifiers (such as cookies.) What we have to do is gather enough information about the device to run this as a signal processing or pattern matching problem.” This means that even if a computer is reformatted, Reputation manager can flag it if it logs into an account it was previously associated with. Like any security system, even Iovation’s Reputation Manager can be dodged. However, it involves a lot of time, effort and computing skill, and most spammers and “sex-pests” that prowl online dating sites don’t really have the abilities to do it, which is why they are easily caught and flagged. Iovation claims its Reputation manager stopped over 730,000 account creations and fraudulent activities last year. Doesn’t that make you feel a lot safer? |
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