

Dating site creates profiles from public records - aresant
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/244737,dating-site-creates-profiles-from-public-records.aspx

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A1kmm
So 98.09% of the profiles on the site are for people who didn't sign up for it
and don't want to hear from site members?

Meaning that from the perspective of a member of the site, if they contact
someone on the site, more likely than not, they won't hear anything back.

Meaning that the site is unlikely to retain very many users - and so the
future present value of a potential customer will be very low.

This in turn mean they can't afford to spend very much money to acquire actual
users - and make the 98.08% even worse to the point where the only people to
visit the site will be people trying to delete their profile and first time
visitors.

One possibility: maybe they aren't actually going to do it, they are just
looking for free publicity. Otherwise, why would they announce it ahead of
time (or if they are just trying to inflate their numbers as a 'fake it until
you make it' strategy, announce it all).

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bermanoid
Our old friend "if it's on the Internet, it's public domain" rears its head
again:

 _"For example, if you open a Facebook account and your setting are not set to
private, all of that information is in the public domain, it is free for the
taking," he told iTnews._

~~~
baddox
I'm not sure how the question of _intellectual property protection_ (public
domain) is relevant to factual information about yourself or another person.
Intellectual property doesn't seem as applicable in this situation as does,
say, privacy.

Details like your religion, age, hometown, etc. wouldn't be covered by
copyright, would they? Nor would they be covered by trademarks or patents or
as trade secrets. Correct me if I'm wrong. As for status updates or things
like favorite quotations or even favorite movie lists, I suppose I can
understand them being considered original creative works which could be
coverable by copyright. Of course, I'm generally against intellectual property
protection as a whole, so I'm not the best judge.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Facts are not copyrightable, but a credible profile looks more like "Hi, I'm
John Doe and I live in Austin, Texas [fact]. I like foo and hate bar. I'm
looking for a girl/guy to love and go on long walks with. (etc)" Such text
_is_ copyrightable.

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jwatzman
The article mentions scraping public Facebook data. Someone else did that a
while ago, resulting in a change to their robots.txt (it's now a whitelist)
and nearly a lawsuit.

[http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-
go...](http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-
facebook.html)

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bugsy
What could possibly go wrong?

