Is Online Dating Good or Bad?

How do you feel about online dating?

Although there are many obvious issues regarding privacy and freedom of speech on Facebook, one that may not be so obvious is that of online dating. Facebook has many applications that allow others on the social networking site to create online dating profiles (through Facebook) rather than having to join websites such as match.com or eHarmony.com. Bucy writes that "40 million Americans...visited an online site last month." Just think, there are over 500 million Facebook users. Many of these users would never dare join an actual online dating site. However, through the "privacy" of their Facebook account, many people who never would have thought to do online dating are now taking part in the craze.

Some of the Facebook application dating services include Cupid,  DateHookup, Social Connect, Datepad, and Zoosk among others.

Zoosk is one of the most popular online dating applications via Facebook. This is the only application dating service that I have seen that has its own commercial. Although I don't feel like the advertisements are very effective, they seem to be doing their job and recruiting people to add the application to their Facebook pages.

In this day and age, many people have come up with "secrets" to achieving in the online dating world. An article entitled Facebook Dating Secrets lists many of these out. The basic tips are to be honest about your personal information, your description, tastes, and hobbies. This is supposed to help you find a more eligible mate. However, I feel like this  poses an issue to personal privacy. If someone feels  like they need to relinquish all of this personal information in order to find a compatible match, they put themselves at risk of leaking personal information to the wrong type of people.

Seeing as this  will be my last blog post, I just want to reconfirm the idea that you must be extremely careful of what you post on your online social networking profiles. You never know who is watching you and it just isn't worth the risk to  post too much information online. So just think of it this way - if you wouldn't say it to a random stranger in person, it's probably best that you don't say it at all.