As part of it’s ongoing efforts to remain relevant to to dating industry, last week SITRAS held a conference call with several major online dating site executives. From what I’ve heard, the topic of the call was to enlist dating sites to, among other issues, put up money to pay for the services of Emily Hackett, whom some of you may recognize from the legislation track at SITRAConII in December. Hackett is the Executive Director of the Internet Alliance, which is a subsidiary of the Direct Marketing Association.
The Internet Alliance has gone on record as being against recent bills such as the now infamous Michigan bill which would have required criminal background checks on consumers using online dating services or would note that background checks had not been done.
Many industry executives agree that such a bill would offer consumers a false sense of security and unfairly discriminate against online businesses. They would prefer to retain the option of implementing such systems at their discretion.
Match.com does not conduct checks on its 14 million members, nor does it have any plans to, according to Joe Cohen, chief operating officer. Last May the company conducted an online survey of 1,500 members, and background checks ranked low in their concerns, he said.
I know for a fact that this does not jive with comments I’ve received about Yahoo! and Match actively pursuing ID verification services.
Marilyn Warren, senior vice president of eharmony.com, agrees. The California-based eharmony.com has 5.5 million members worldwide:
This is something that I know Herb Vest is very committed to, but I don’t know that that’s true for others in the industry,” she said. “For those of us who have worldwide involvement, it would be a very localized kind of thing. I don’t know that it would achieve the intended effect.
Yet another industry alliance is in the works and will be announce soon, stay tuned for more details.
