Facebook reported on Thursday it is revealing its most current service over the US, a stage for dating. What could turn out badly? A great deal, it turns out.

The new service, Facebook Dating, can be gotten to in the Facebook app yet expects clients to make a different dating-explicit profile. It at that point joins clients with potential matches dependent on area, showed inclinations, occasions visited, gatherings, and different elements. Facebook Dating will incorporate with Instagram and offer an element called Secret Crush, which enables clients to gather a rundown of companions they have an enthusiasm for, to be coordinated with if the pound records them also.

Facebook has touted new protection and security includes inside the dating service, including the capacity for clients to impart plans and area to choose companions when going out on the town and enabling clients to conceal dating profiles from companions of companions to abstain from uncovering delicate data like sexual direction.

Notwithstanding, many are wary an organization soiled by various security embarrassments ought to be endowed with helping clients with the private adventure of discovering love.

"In case you're attempting to abstain from dating services that have warnings, you can't generally discover one that has more warnings than Facebook," Jason Kelley, a computerized strategist at online protection charitable the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. "They have a horrible reputation of guarding client information."



The announcement of Facebook Dating comes days after the company admitted to exposing more than 419m user IDs and phone numbers online, a glitch in June 2018 made private posts of 14 million users public, and another breach in September 2018 compromised the data of 50 million users. In a separate scandal it was revealed in 2018 the company improperly harvested the data of millions of users through a partnership with campaign firm Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook’s phone number breach underlies a concerning inability to determine whether privacy concerns have been effectively resolved, Kelley said. The numbers exposed were amassed using a tool Facebook disabled in April 2018 after the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.



“Facebook says the dating service is secure, but how do we know it won’t realize a few years from now it was not as protected as it thought?” Kelley said. “It gives us pause when things they have changed years ago are still being shown to cause problems in terms of data privacy.”

Concerns of using dating data for advertising

Privacy advocates are concerned about Facebook entering the dating space and gleaning more information about users, given their history of using personal data to target users with advertising about everything from mental health services to depressed people to baby products for pregnant people.



The company may be able to build more sophisticated ad profiles based on what kinds of people users like, whom they match with, and even how dates go, Kelley said.

Facebook says users’ dating profiles will be separate from their Facebook activity and not used for ad targeting. But Facebook’s track record casts doubt on such promises, said Mark Weinstein, a privacy advocate and founder of social network MeWe.

“After so many years of countless privacy infractions, apologies, fines and pledges to do better, does anyone really believe a promise Facebook makes in regard to data privacy?” he said. “Facebook will use Facebook Dating as a new portal into users’ lives; collecting, targeting, and selling dating history, romantic preferences, emotions, sexual interests, fetishes, everything.”

Millions more opened up to online scams

Facebook is entering the online dating space at a time when the internet is more rife with fraud than ever. In 2018, more than 21,000 romance scams were reported to the FTC, up from 8,500 in 2015. People targeted by these scams reported a median loss of $2,600 or a collective loss of $143m in 2018. With an estimated 221 million US users, Facebook could potentially be exposing millions to fraud.

“If a service exists, people are going to find a way to use it for some kind of scam,” Kelley said. “It would be unsurprising, given how much data is available on users, it would be used for scams.”

The social media giant is already taking measures to prevent fraud, making users unable to send links, photos, or payments within Facebook Messages to prevent scams.

But with the number of privacy, security and scam concerns, privacy advocates say users are likely better off meeting potential love interests on other apps – or IRL.

“You would have to be pretty desperate with all of its history of privacy scandals to give Facebook any more insight into your life than you already have,” Kelley said.