Facebook chooses Canada for Dating feature launch, but privacy concerns abound



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TORONTO – Mark Zuckerberg is ready to play matchmaker for Canadians.

His company Facebook will be able to make his social media platform more than just a friend.

Facebook Dating, which has been previously piloted in Colombia, operates with users creating a profile of their own.

The company will recommend matches that they are not friends with, but who share dating preferences, interests and if they like, mutual friends or groups and events.

The offering will support text-only conversations between matches in a effort to minimize "casual encounters" by building long-term relationships instead and will attempt to reduce catfishing a user's traditional Facebook profile.

"Said Charmaine Hung, Facebook Dating's technical program manager," We were really thinking about how to make online dating really difficult … and preventing people from trusting online dating and forming a meaningful connection. "We wanted to make sure you could build that trust with someone."

Facebook Dating's Canadian roll-out is a leading technology in the field of data breaches. The most high-profile cam last winter, when the company admitted to the data of up to 50 million Facebook Analytics. 50 million accounts have been accessed by unknown attackers.

Zuckerberg previously claimed "we have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning."

Tamir Israel, a lawyer at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa.

"People will think it is a degree of isolation because they are deciding what goes on their profile."

"It looks like, in spite of the challenges, they are making an effort to silo this a bit from the rest of their ecosystem, but the problem is that they have a bad track record of eroding that over time."

Privacy concerns are why Facebook has introduced the phrase "integrity and safety," said Hung.

For example, users will have to opt for the feature setting instead of being automatically enrolled. When they opt-in, they will need to initialize their location to verify they are in the city they are purporting to be in, but they can not find that they have signed up.

There will also be a feature that allows people to be blocked and prevents them from occurring.

If they are overwhelmed with games or want to take a break from dating, they can break down and if they decide the app is not for them, they can opt out and all of them will be destroyed, Hung said.

"Imran Ahmad, a partner at Miller Thomson, who leads the firm's cybersecurity practice, said.

"The more you share about yourself, the more there is potential exposure from a privacy point of view."

Social media users are becoming more attuned to privacy concerns.

"Arguably folks should be more comfortable with the fact that they have gone out of their way than ever before," he said. "Their information is probably more secure than it was in the past."

Follow @ Tara-Deschamps on Twitter.

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