Dating industry dodginess

And what do you know, the unsubscribe link for Fitness-Singles.com doesn't work! It appears to update their database (it takes me to a page which seems to remember the unsubscribed options being ticked between visits) but it doesn't actually prevent spam being sent to me! Wankers.

This isn't the first time it's happened to me either, divorcedpeoplemeet.com did more or less the same, spamming me with a profile it had set up, obviously with password in plaintext and no verification email. The interesting thing is that divorcedpeoplemeet.com is run by match.com / IAC, supposedly a reputable bunch. I emailed them about it, they deleted 'my account' but refused to engage with my points about the spam / security problems.

So I did some reading. There are loads of examples of dodgy practices in this industry. There's a BBC documentary about it. To save you 30 minutes (although I'm not going to repeat names of specific companies here), the main thrust of the documentary is about sites creating fake profiles to entice users. The documentary also manages to buy a database of fake profiles from a company in the US, containing examples of British people who didn't know their data was for sale.

Sites want genuine profiles to attract customers but they need customers to create those genuine profiles. So a common model is to make it very easy to sign up and create a profile for free, increasing the number of profiles, but to interact with matches, a customer has then got to pay. This model creates unfortunate incentives. If caught with its pants down, the company can plausibly blame 'scammers'.

Many dating sites (probably most) are just affiliate sites to the same umbrella network. Someone sets up an affiliate site which they will try to establish a brand and USP with, e.g. tractionengineenthusiastsdating.com (I made that up), and the umbrella site gives the affiliate cash for every customer signing up. Here's the sneaky bit, tractionengineenthusiastsdating.com doesn't just display profiles of people signed up on that site, but everyone on the umbrella network who matches some criteria. It might surprise someone to see their profile visible on a completely different site.

If the site is an affiliate network, tricks like fake profiles get even easier. Any affiliate can dump fake profiles onto the central network, and the affiliate can be kept at arms length, with the umbrella network able to deny all knowledge.

There are various reports of various sites refusing to delete profiles of people (because that would be one less profile on the site), or editing profiles to remove text like "NB: I'VE LEFT THE SITE". From the ICO's letter to dating companies, it is concerned about T&Cs which give the company irrevocable rights to users' data.

Another example of fishy stuff is that plentyoffish.com got hacked, and it turned out they stored passwords in plaintext! Not so surprising they stored them in plaintext when apparently they automatically email(ed) members with their account details if they've been inactive for a certain amount of time!

Anyway, it seems dodgy practices are widespread. People are being ripped off, and I wouldn't say it's a case of caveat emptor, it's closer to fraud. Instead of specific legislation, or some QUANGO (with a plush London office, and chief exec on 6 figures, and a team of staff, all taxpayer funded), could we have a data protection act with real teeth?

Fitness-Singles.com Spam

I came home today to an email welcoming me to Fitness-Singles.com (or fitnesssingles.com as is used on the email, which redirects to the first address):

The thing is, I didn't sign up or visit the site, and I've never visited it. Note the plaintext password in the email. That's a huge security no-no. There was also no confirmation email, to verify that the person creating the account owns the email address, another security no-no.

The reason that is bad is that a scammer might set up accounts for email addresses they have on a spam list, and some of those victims will log in using the username and password the scammer created, conveniently sent back to the victim. With online dating, security, screening, and trust is are big things that a web site should want to emphasise, and this site seems to be ignoring simple security best practices.

Another strange thing is the message at the bottom about unsubscribing. I get those messages on marketing emails, but not in emails referring to bona fide membership of sites. So I suspect this is a marketing exercise from Fitness-Singles.com rather than something a third party scammer set up. The aim would be to make it as easy as possible for people to get on the site, but at the expense of standard security practices.

I then did some Googling. Look at this from their FAQs:

Are your members for real?

Absolutely.  All profiles are user generated and we are extremely diligent about removing any profiles that are misleading or created for purposes other than finding an activity partner or a date. Our editorial staff monitors profiles 24/7 and will intercept any profile we deem questionable before it enters the community.

Occasionally, if a profile is approved that turns out to be phony or an attempt to spam, we move quickly to remove it from our community. If you come across any of these profiles, please contact us to report them immediately to our profile evaluation team and we will review the member in question promptly.

Oops! How can this be taken seriously when 'members' can receive emails such as the above from them?

So maybe there's a difference between accounts (one of which I apparently have been given) and profiles, which possibly I don't have because I wouldn't have filled one of those out. So if a spam membership email doesn't result in an active profile, then they could still claim their profiles are real. But email number two was also waiting for me when I got home:

Oops! It looks like my 'profile' can be seen by other members, if that email is to be believed. And notice the lack of spam unsubscribe message.

Almost the end of my outraged whinge. But what's this? I have a new message from some bronzed Adonis!

Note the unsubscribe message is back. There's even a "this email may contain advertisements", which might suggest that not all profiles are genuine, or that the person behind that genuine profile didn't really send a message, it's just an inducement to get me to create a profile.

Then Email #4 in 24 hours then said that a member has requested my photo. I bet.

On their home page, it says they're a BBB-accredited business. So will send BBB a link to this post. If anyone from Fitness-Singles.com would like me to delete this post, I'm more than happy to do that if you stop doing this kind of stuff.

More HS2

So the budget has been increased to near on £43bn today. I seem to remember the cost-to-benefit-ratio was charitably 1.4 last time, so the extra ten billion brings that down to 1.05. The associated costs of raising the money (i.e. economic activity that doesn't happen because people are taxed that bit more) I would guess put the 1.4 figure into the not-worth-bothering-with category. Now with a BCR of 1.05 it's in the let's-criminalise-wreckless-politicians category.

Austerity

Counter-cyclical government spending seems to be common sense to me, it also seems to be common sense that in order for this to work, a government should run a surplus during the good years.

I haven't read much about what happens to the Keynesian prescription if there isn't that buffer of a surplus, particularly not in the Guardian. Are all bets off, or is the stimulus recommendation the same? What happens if the stimulus doesn't return the economy to growth within a sensible amount of time, should spending continue? What if it's likely that the recession is due to various factors such as declining international competitiveness and an aging population - do you keep spending? I imagine the picture becomes a complicated political one, involving balancing short-term and long-term aims. That's not something politicians should be expected to be good at, not when it's all about headlines, winning elections, and all about what an electorate thinks that expects politicians to solve every problem and make everything better.

The current course of action is to reduce the spending slowly enough to keep pain to a minimum, but without losing the confidence of the gilt markets. So we continue to have a large stimulus, but it's coming down because in the long term we want to keep the massive amount of debt we've got to deal with to a minimum. In drawing this process out, economic growth will hopefully pick up and make the whole thing easier. Given the circumstances I think this is hardly the Tories sharpening knives and relishing cuts - and it's worth remembering the cuts are less than Alistair Darling promised at the last election. It's also worth having a bit of perspective, we're spending all this money, yet, for example, we're not at war, we've not had a huge natural disaster, we've not just run out of oil, and we don't know we're not five or ten years from an equally bad economic crisis.

However, a lot of people think that the current recession is caused by austerity, and we need more spending right now to solve things. That spending in the right areas is a multiplier effect, leading to more tax revenues, and that conversely, cuts lead to a negative spiral of reducing tax revenues. I think proponents of these ideas need to demonstrate why they haven't invented an economic perpetual growth machine. If the extra spending is a no-brainer, why not even more so we get an even bigger effect? Why not do it all the time, even when the economy is growing, to achieve even more growth?

The answer to those questions is probably that, as we spend more and more, the positive gains of spending borrowed money tail off and get replaced by a bigger and bigger component of simply consuming tomorrow's wealth today. That will then have to be paid back tomorrow, and once we've spent it, we haven't achieved anything and don't have further growth unless we borrow more, and this can't go on forever. And if that's the case, the sooner we accept it, the less painful it is.

People who want more money spent also seem to ignore the big questions we face, or at least pretend that those questions will be easier to solve if we approach them off the back of a bit of free spending-induced growth. These big questions we must face are, for example, what to do about Britain's decreasing competitiveness, increasing welfare dependency, increasing debt levels (public and private), the under-supply of housing, and the cost of retirement. It's just not as simple as blaming evil Tories and greedy banksters for our predicaments.

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HS2 again

I do not think there is an economic or environmental case for HS2. Looking at the bigger picture, I think it will only increase London-centrism, and there are alternatives that would stimulate the economy far more, such as granting more planning permission, or cutting taxes. There are many costs of HS2 that are not budgeted for, such as improved transport links from Euston, and the likely overrun of the compensation scheme. And then the demand for tickets is likely overstated, as is lost productivity due to being on a train. I think the government's case does not consider that the economy will make better use of high speed Internet connections, and that the future of transport likely lies with driverless cars. Since much has been made of NIMBYs with loud voices, it is worth mentioning that the Campaign for HSR is funded by vested corporate interests.

I am concerned about the vacuous rhetoric about investment in our future, creating jobs, and bringing Britain into the 21st century. These things can be said of virtually anything the government might want to do, but this rhetoric does not make a plan better than the very unglamorous and boring alternative - not spending our hard-earned money. I am under the impression HS2's claimed net benefit ratio of 2 ignores the social cost of paying for it, in terms of tax wedges etc. This means the true benefit ratio is probably closer to one, even before the underlying optimistic assumptions are questioned. The country faces a host of problems in the future, such as old age getting more expensive, rising costs of healthcare, increased competitiveness from emerging economies, an education system falling down the international league tables, a depressingly large total debt, a housing crisis, a huge number of NEETs, and a massively expensive state which still has a huge deficit. All of these things are likely to reduce our wealth and/or make the state more burdensome, thus increasing the damage of raising each additional pound of taxation. I've read that it will create 40,000 jobs. That probably works out at £800,000 per job created. How many private sector jobs will be destroyed by the tax required to fund that?

If there is an economic case for HS2, it should be funded privately by investors. If it fails, it loses the money of people who freely took the risk. If it succeeds, investors profit by having provided a service people want more than the cost of the ticket, so everyone wins. There is no such free choice when governments engage in large and risky projects. The Victorians showed it was possible to build railways without public subsidy.

Not only is the business case very weak but I would have thought that HS2 would be a simple issue for Conservatives - don't upset Tory heartlands, don't spend taxpayers money unless it's an absolutely necessary evil. The Conservatives will lose party donors because of this, and voters, and party members, and councillors, and possibly seats. They should be expending their political capital on getting the country's finances into shape and reversing bad Labour decisions.

I think driverless cars are an exciting development, which I think will be a massive driver of growth not requiring public subsidy. Transport will be safer (cheaper insurance, and many other related benefits), and a great deal of time currently spent driving will be able to be used productively. With computer-controlled junctions, and bumper-to-bumper driving, network capacity will increase massively. Computers will mitigate the causes congestion that complexity scientists have studied. Road maintenance will be cheaper. Time will be saved by the car parking itself after it has delivered the occupant to the destination, or driving to pick up the next person who booked their journey by smartphone. Car parks will have improved density due to no need to open doors. I think Britain should be leading the way. We need to investigate which laws will need changing, and we should maybe channel research grants into looking at how we can develop and exploit the technology. This isn't a long way off either, Google has a car that has driven a couple of hundred thousand kilometres through San Francisco, the only crash happening while it was on manual override.

Digital Surveillance Plans

We can't assume the good intentions of future (or current) governments. Lawmakers should consider how a power might be abused, especially when it comes to civil liberties or giving ministers statutory powers (enabling acts). Then if it absolutely must go ahead, it should have a sunset clause, requiring a vote in parliament every five years for its continued existence.

There are immense practical difficulties with these plans. Real-time access to all of this data is an immense technological challenge. There will be monumental data storage, bandwidth, and processing requirements. It will be a huge challenge to keep up-to-date (if people start using a new social network for example, traffic to and from the servers for that site will need to be understood by the snooping system). This is a huge undertaking, and will lead to the intelligence services demanding more and more resources to make the most of their shiny new toy.

It will be hard enough to keep up with normal uses of the Internet. It will not have a chance of dealing with internet traffic which uses networks of proxies (outside the UK), such as "Tor", and/or uses encryption and steganography.

It will be expensive. Either it will have to be paid for out of taxation, or ISPs and telecoms companies will pass the costs on to customers, but one way or another I think it will be misdirecting economic resources, and will be yet another drag on those of us just trying to do productive things to earn money to support our families, despite high taxes, high costs of property, and the myriad other problems we face.

You can always make an argument that new powers will stop nasty things happening, but what we're after is a balance between state power and privacy, and a proper sensible debate about that. So to hear the home secretary suggesting that it will catch paedophiles and terrorists is galling, I hoped such tired arguments and populist simplicity was only a thing of the last Labour government.