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TORONTO – Mark Zuckerberg is ready to play the matchmaker for the Canadiens.
His company Facebook Inc. will strive to make users of its social media platform more than just friends with a new dating feature that will mark its launch in North America in Canada. Thursday
Facebook Dating, which was previously the focus of pilot projects in Colombia, allows users to create profiles separate from those of Facebook and kept away from friends.
The company will recommend matches that users do not already have. friends with, but who share dating preferences, interests and if they wish, mutual friends or groups and events.
The offer will support text-only conversations between matches to minimize "casual encounters" by building short-term relationships and will attempt to reduce cat fishing – using a false online identity to deceive future love interests – by importing ages and places from a user's traditional Facebook
"We really thought about how inauthentic experiences make online dating very difficult … and prevent people from doing trust online dating and establish a meaningful connection, "said Charmaine Hung, technical program manager of Facebook Dating. "We wanted to make sure you could build that trust with someone."
Facebook Dating's deployment in Canada comes as the technology giant is plunged into privacy concerns following a series of data breaches. The most important story came last winter, when the company admitted that the data of nearly 50 million Facebook users had been misused by the company 's. Cambridge Analytica badysis. Users' privacy was threatened again in September when the company reported a major security breach in which 50 million accounts could have been accessed by unknown attackers.
Some experts have stated that the dating offer would itself raise confidentiality issues and that it is unlikely that it relieves platform-related anxiety – even though Zuckerberg had previously stated, "We have designed this solution with privacy and security in mind from the beginning."
Tamir Israel, Lawyer at the Samuelson Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic -Glushko of the University of Toronto Ottawa, said that he worried about the difference between Facebook profiles and dating because they are contained in the same application.
"People will think that there is some degree of isolation as they decide what goes into their (dating) profile … but we have seen time and time again that this type of fracture is hard to maintain, " said Israel.
"It looks like, despite the challenge In fact, they are striving to dissociate this element from the rest of their ecosystem, but the problem is that they have a bad track record with respect to it. erosion over time. "
That's why Facebook introduced Dating with a series of measures aimed at" integrity and safety, "said Hung.
For example, users will have to choose the dating feature instead of registering automatically.When they choose to participate, they will need to initialize their location services to verify that they are in the city in which they claim to be, but they can cancel this access once they have registered.
There will also be a feature, this allows people to be blocked and prevents users from reporting more than once the interests. potential, if the other person does not
If a user is overwhelmed with matches or wants to take a break, he may suspend Dating and if they feel that the application does not suit them, they may choose not to participate and all their dating data will be destroyed, Hung said.
"Good on Facebook for thinking about some of these issues," said Imran Ahmad, a partner at Miller Thomson, who heads the firm's cybersecurity practice.
"The more you say about yourself, the more you are exposed to the risk of privacy.
He said that he was going to give the law cebook benefits from the doubt because he's committed to solving his privacy issues and creating a culture in which media users are increasingly sensitive to privacy concerns.
"It can be argued that people should be more comfortable with Facebook now that it is closely examined. they recently made mistakes because everyone looks at everything they did, "he said. "Their information is probably safer than in the past."
Follow @ Tara – Deschamps on Twitter.
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