
Ask HN: Seeking advice wrt dating service and legal pitfalls - erikbye
I’m building a dating&#x2F;new friends service; there are numerous and diverse potential legal pitfalls, what are they and how do I protect myself and my users? For those of you with experience building such a site, or any kind of social network, what unexpected difficulties did you encounter, and did any of those arise because of technical issues (or implementation)?<p>What are your age and identity-verification recommendations, any nice APIs out there? Since this will be a free service, ideally, I’d like to avoid credit card-based verification as you lose potential users who refuse to give their card even if it won’t be charged (or a refunded charge).<p>I have implemented account activation by SMS; there are few anonymous numbers in my launch-country, and registration at launch (and a pre-launch campaign) will be restricted to numbers with this country’s call prefix.
I have noticed the only verification Tinder does is Facebook and SMS activation.<p>Any general advice?
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Rjevski
What's the actual thing you want to defend against? Is it spam? If so
technical solutions work great - flag new messages for moderator review, flag
users/IPs who post more messages than the average user does, etc.

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brudgers
Legal questions are best answered by an attorney familiar with the laws in
your jurisdiction.

Good luck.

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erikbye
Yes, but probably not much advice as to APIs or technical implementations that
caused problems. I'd like to hear from founders.

