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On August 30, Adam Heath Avitable woke up to find someone had created a profile on the dating site OkCupid using his e-mail address. Avitable clicked through one of the welcome e-mails from the service and found himself faced with a profile with the username gayassfuck, his photograph, and profile descriptions clearly meant to discredit him, such as “I’m not looking for love, just someone to live out my rape fantasies.”
Sites are not liable for what users post, but should they be doing more for us?
The most shocking aspect of the profile, perhaps, was the last bit, where under the section “You should message me if…”, the person who had created this profile had written: “You’re just looking for something physical and happen to be close by. I’m looking for someone to fulfill my rape fantasy. I want an aggressive man to just break into my house and go at it…” The profile then appended Avitable’s real home address.
Browsing further, Avitable discovered that the person who created the profile had also messaged some 24 men on the site. He contacted OkCupid immediately, concerned about the implications their ease of creation had for denizens of the web.
In this case, someone used his e-mail address and OkCupid doesn't require a password when you access the site from an e-mail, so Avitable was able to access the account and remove the information. But what if someone created an account with his personal information without using his e-mail address? Without those notifications alerting Avitable that a new account had been created, he might have never known that there was a profile on OkCupid with his home address inviting men to come over to his house and rape him.
Avitable wanted answers, but OkCupid did not respond to that first or a second e-mail, sent over their web contact form.
"OkCupid, I expect a response,” Avitable wrote in a blog post chronicling the incident. "I want the IP address of the person who did this. I would also like to know why you allow profiles to be published sharing private information such as someone’s address without any oversight, and what part of your business plan supports rape."
Finally, after Avitable’s tweets and post had received a substantial amount of views and shares, OkCupid reached out today:
Hi Adam,
My name is Alice, and I’m the customer service rep for OkCupid. I’m so sorry that you have not gotten a reply about your issue before now, and I hope I can help.
First -- the account in question, gayasssfuck, was completely removed today, and the IP it was created from has been blocked from OkCupid. We can’t give you the specific IP address, but if you do decide to file a police report, we would be happy to cooperate with law enforcement.
Second -- we absolutely do not condone sharing any private information on a profile, including addresses or email addresses. We do remove any profiles that share this information, as well as profiles that are obviously fakes as this one was, especially when they contain references to rape. That is absolutely unacceptable for OkCupid. However, our company is a lot smaller than you may realize, and we do not have the resources to hand-check every profile before it goes live. We rely on a flagging system, where users flag an inappropriate photo or profile, and then it gets reviewed by us for removal. It appears that this profile was not flagged by anyone, and we missed your emails, so it unfortunately flew under our radar. I sincerely apologize for this.
Again, I’m sorry we didn’t catch this sooner, and please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.
Alice
The problems with OkCupid current mode of operations are numerous.
From a perspective of customer support, it is very unfortunate that OkCupid has not put sufficient resources into responding and dealing with incidents of abuse that users and non-users report. Maintaining the trust of users is essential to remaining relevant and competitive in the dating space, as OkCupid undoubtedly wants to remain.
Secondly, the fact that they do not perform e-mail verification is interesting, given how common this practice is. Another security concern arises when one considers that Avitable was able to access his profile directly from an e-mail without having to log in. In this case, this was fortunate, as it enables users who may have fake profiles created to remove damaging information from a profile while OkCupid takes their time addressing their concerns. However, from a
