Online Personals Watch: News on the Online Dating Industry and Business

OPW Interview With Mark Kapczynski, SVP of OneRep

OPW - Mark Kapczynski is SVP of OneRep.com, which helps consumers and employees protect themselves online. (Full Disclosure: OneRep.com is a client of Courtland Brooks) - Mark Brooks

What does OneRep do?
OneRep scrubs unwanted personal information off the Internet. Google yourself right now: full name + city, state. You're likely to see listings from privacy-breaching websites that reveal your street address, phone number, email, age, and loads of other details, including your work, finances, political affiliations, etc. Such information can be used for staking, harassing, identity theft, and even a physical attack. We remove sensitive personal information from Google and 100+ websites to keep you private and safe.

How does OneRep work?
We SCAN 100+ sites to find where an individual is exposed. We then erase personal information from these sites and continuously monitor all the 100+ sites to ensure people remain private.

How does this help dating/community users?
Helping daters stay private online leads to safety in real life. They choose when to divulge personal contact information; that choice is not made for them by Google. For dating websites, offering members a service like this would help differentiate your brand and foster loyalty by showing you really care about member safety. OneRep complements your existing security programs, giving members more ways to stay protected while dating online.

What is the offering for dating/community apps?
There are two main ways to engage:
A. For dating websites and apps, offering OneRep annual subscriptions via an affiliate model is an easy, no-risk way to test whether your members will value this type of privacy protection service.
B. Directly integrate OneRep via API or SDK for tighter integration with your existing user flow and experience.

How is OneRep distinguished to do this job?
OneRep has been protecting consumers since 2015, being the first and only service to fully automate personal information removal from the web, making the removal easier to scale and more affordable. Our founder, Dimitri Shelest, was named Top 25 Cybersecurity CEO for 2021 by The Software Report. His expertise has been published in CPO Magazine, Safety Detectives, Hackernoon, and others. OneRep has proven consumer demand, with ~400K active users and ~ 6M public records removed from the Internet.

See the top news on OneRep

Dating App Scammers Are Rampant

INSIDER - The hit Netflix documentary "The Tinder Swindler," raised awareness about dating app scams, also called romance scams. Romance scam victims lost $1.3B total in the past 5 years, according to the FTC. In January, a man in Denver lost $1.6M after a Hinge match told him to invest it into a retirement account. Another woman gave a Hinge match her $300K in life savings to invest into a cryptocurrency exchange site that turned out to be fake. There are ways to preemptively protect yourself from identity theft and financial fraud, Mark Kapczynski, SVP of strategic partnerships at cybersecurity service OneRep. He suggested removing personal information from Google searches. Even if a dating-app match only has your first name, general location, and picture, they can still track you down with a quick internet search, said Kapczynski. "There are 150 or 200 sites that will have your personal information on them. Google your date and do a reverse-image search. Last, he said look out for certain behaviors, like intense persistence, or asking for money or to meet in a remote location.

by Julia Naftulin
See full article at Insider

See the top news on OneRep

Online Privacy Becomes a Growing Concern as Data Becomes More Accessible

WXYZ - Experts say a simple search on the internet can reveal an individual's home address, phone number, and more. According to the latest annual Data Breach Report, the overall number of data compromises last year was up ~68% compared to 2020. Senior VP of OneRep Mark Kapczynski says these days you can find a lot about someone on the internet in 30 seconds. "They are called people search websites," says the security expert. "They buy all our personal information, name addresses, DOB, where we work, everything about our kids.They create pages that can be indexed by google, so that's why it shows up on google." Kapczynski says one of the most effective solutions is to sign up for a web scrubbing service, where a customer's data is monitored and removed every time it pops up.

by Faraz Javed
See full article at WXYZ

See the top news on OneRep

How to Remove Your Name From Search Websites

CONSUMER REPORTS - Sites like BeenVerified, FastPeopleSearch, and PeopleFinders are part of the vast data broker industry that collects information about people or companies and then sells it. Removing your information from these sites is time-consuming. An easier way to remove your information from these sites is to pay a service to take care of the task. DeleteMe currently removes your information from 36 sites every three months for $129 per year, or $229 per year for two people. Kanary scans 2K sites for your information, and says it has a 70% success rate in removing it. The cost is $89 per year for an individual or $129.99 per year for a family. OneRep currently removes your information from 107 sites for $100 per year (or $180 for a family).

See full article at WTKR

See the top news on OneRep

OneRep Review

KNOWTECHIE - OneRep is an online privacy service that protects users from the worst parts of the internet. They can set up your profile in just a couple of minutes, and then it finds and deletes their personal information on ~100 people-search sites with the push of a button. If you've never opted out of a people-search site, chances are you're currently vulnerable to identity theft, doxxing, spam, and even reputational harm. That's where OneRep comes in. Rather than opting out of these sites by hand (just to have your information pop up again), OneRep removes and keeps you off of over 100 data brokers. What's So Dangerous about Data Brokers? There's a big market for selling personal data, which explains the thousands of data brokers on the internet. These sites track down personal information and gather it into a profile that others can view or purchase. This can include phone number, occupation, salary, address, and plenty more.

by Chris Smith
See full article at KnowTechie