Yahoo Personals has settled with one Robert Anthony over a date-baiting case from last fall. Yahoo has avoided wasting an enormous amount of time by settling, which means they paid the guy off. I don’t know much about the issue but it sounds like the guy thought he was dating a real person when in fact he was communicating with a test profile.
The takeaway of the settlement is that Y! Personals will inactivate stale profiles and continue to ferret out fake profiles, which they have done all along. Amending the Terms of Service Yahoo relies on members to report bad behavior, that’s the only way they are going to maintain any semblance of a clean database.
Most important is that profiles inactive for 120 days will be rendered unsearchable. This is great news and will hopefully cut down on the number of emails sent to people no longer in the system.
When a user cancels their subscription, a screen will be presented giving them the option to delete the profile, render it unsearchable or keep the profile active. If the user makes no selection, the profile will automatically be deactivated.
I am not clear on the difference between unsearchable and deactivated and in what context would you leave a dating site and leave your profile active?
More at Online Personals Watch.
