Sex, Lies, and Online Dating Pt. 2

Safeguarding Your Love Life  – Part 2

In a recent Fox News 4 broadcast out of Dallas Fort-Worth, social-networking expert Shama Kabani discussed different ways in which social networks can help to safeguard one’s love life. “Facebook has five hundred and fifteen million users,” Kabani noted. “If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world.”

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The ongoing flow and volume of people-related information published by Facebook’s many members make it a valuable and frequently overlooked resource for finding out more about a prospective date. “Search for the person you are going out on a date with, and depending how much information they have made public, you can find out everything,” Kabani noted – “from what they do for a living, to how they feel about their exes.”

“Also you can use Spokeo to find out all the different social networks they are on,” she added. “It’s pretty neat! You can type in the name, email – depending on what information you have available…“
“Let’s say you just picked up a phone number at a club,” she offered as an example. “You can type that in as well, and it will tell you everything – all the social networks they are on. You can find out a lot of information.”

Tapping a popular social network like Facebook to learn more about a prospective date is without a doubt a smart move. Many members are surprisingly free with the information they publish about themselves, and their social-networking profiles often become virtual treasure troves. Some seem to forget that their digital personas are not confined to a discreet online universe, and that these could actually carry over into their brick-and-mortar lives at some point as well. Instead, they compartmentalize. They create an artificial division in their minds, and act as though “never the twain shall meet.” They lead one life online, and another off, and the online version can often be surprisingly uninhibited. Self-censorship is nil, and profiles are often unexpectedly revealing.  

While Facebook’s ubiquitousness makes it an obvious place to start when attempting to learn more about a prospective date, it can nevertheless still fall short. It is only one source, and may not always be revealing enough. This is where a specialized people-search engine such as Spokeo can come in pretty handy. Spokeo not only searches for information about a person on Facebook, but on over forty different social networks. It aggregates all of the public information published about a person on those sites and delivers it to one convenient location— including pictures. It doesn’t end there however. Spokeo looks at many other sources as well. A single search can tell a searcher where their prospective date lives, his or her marital status, phone number, email — it can even describe the neighborhood that the potential date resides in. And, amazingly, one does not even have to have a computer to access all of the information.

Spokeo recently released a very nifty mobile product that lets daters conduct searches using only a smartphone. All they need do is simply type in a name, phone number, or email, and no matter where they are, it instantly puts information at their fingertips. This makes it particularly useful in those impromptu social situations where one might need to find out about someone quickly and discreetly. (For more about Spokeo mobile see Best Mobile People-Search.)

The world of online dating, like the rest of the digital universe, is hardly static.  The deep-seated and powerful biologically-driven human needs for companionship and love continue to push the frontiers of technology, and drive its evolution towards greater innovation and development of further interfaces for social interaction. New products and approaches are emerging on the digital forefront all the time, some bordering almost on the bizarre.
TO BE CONTINUED…

FOX NEWS 4 – LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR DATE