TruFina = True Fluff, and Worse
If true love can be bought through a weak identity scam, it's no surprise that anyone would sell themselves out as the romance shill.
There’s been a recent craze of establishing and asserting a verified identification as a badge of honor to display through the course of on-line dating. The concept is ripe with good intentions – either to make money, or provide tacit assurance to prosepct dates and mates that the person behind the flirtations is real – but there could be unwanted con-sequences long-term.
At least in the case of TruFina.com, anyone who knows anything about me, has rifled my trash can, or lived with me, can obtain and claim a TruFina identity as if they were me, associated with any email address they choose. Just how many 'me' are there out there, could there be, and who cares?
Obviously the folks at TruFina.com knows little or nothing about identity verification, identity theft, fraud, nor on-line dating, yet they claim, as other such services do, that you will gain some advantage that will ultimately protect you, me, or a prospective mate, from dealing with the wrong people. Such services assume that we’ll trust them and the sources of their data, to be reliable, accurate and looking after our best interests.
Unfortunately these services lure people into a false sense of trust, validation, verification and protected identity - all through a weak one-sided "give me your information, I'll make sure who you are and certify that claim."
Aside from possibly storing your personal data for untold future purposes, they are doing nothing more than a cursory lookup of readily available information from the likes of a Equifax or ChoicePoint - data brokers and information banks. They buy and collect information from various sources and re-sell it in many different forms – you may be familiar with them if you’ve had a pre-employment background check run on you – your employer must tell you and the company must share with you what they provided. We have no prior or accurate knowledge of or control over the source or validity of the information they have. Given that ChoicePoint's database was recently compromised, we should have no trust that they aren't storing and distributing false information about anyone.
None of what TruFina or any of the other identity certification services offer could have prevented the financial loss the group of initial developers suffered through the unscrupulous practices of TruFina's founders. They new without question the identity of the people that became TruFina and made hollow promises and left invoices unpaid. If you want trust, security, comfort, peace, love and eternal happiness, TruFina is not the place to go nor trust for it. But wait, there's more...
We are seeing more and more issues and layers of 'trust' thrust before us, based on no more than one web-front operation buying data from another web-front operation that collects unqualified, unverified data from several other unknown sources. We jump into a tangled web woven by others unknown and consider it 'trust' because they have a trustworthy-looking web site, an official looking certification logo, and offer a lot of fancy words about privacy.
Information brokers such as ChoicePoint are under no legal or recognized ethical scrutiny to ensure the data they acquire and distribute is accurate, much less if it can be compromised or if some of the records are totally false. Further, in the case of many such operations, the pro-grams are written off-shore in places that have no ethics much less agreements about what happens to the data they handle - your data - which may be in China, Hong Kong, India, Egypt, Russia... Do you know where your data is and who's playing with it?
What does this this type of asserted and assumed 'trust' do for an on-line dater? That depends on other dater's requirements for 'trust', which has less to do with your Social Security number, who previously used your present address, and whether or not you got a speeding ticket last month than it does with how you behave and others perceive you in specific contexts - that and silly human emotion, neither of which can be applied for and certified by an on-line database derieved from an-other on-line database derived from... an endless stream of unqualified, unmanageable data sources.
Of all the friends and associates I've discussed on-line dating reality with, and those I have 'met' on-line in the course of research, the type of assurances they rely on, and what would improve the quality of their on-line dating quests leading to dates in real-life, an identity check was not high on the list.
Interestingly enough - not one of them has ever asked a real-life date to see a driver's license, Social Security card, and a list of past occupants of their current home - before the first date or after the wedding - whether they became acquainted on-line or at the local coffee shop.
Their criteria? Chemistry. Behavior. Communication. Circumstances. Experience. Intuition. Reality. But not ID cards and certifications!
The significance, or insignificance of this 'identity' dilemma must not be lost on anyone either observing or patronizing it. This is a simple attempt to make money preying on and playing with the hearts, souls, hormones, emotions and pocketbooks of over 40 million generally nice, well-meaning people who turn to the likes of Match.com, Yahoo! Personals and such instead of the local bar scene for companionship.
The data they are 'selling' has little or no true financial value except what someone is willing to pay to dig it up and report it, but it is invaluable to those of us who the data is about. Aside from the Internet connections and servers and programming that mangle the data, the cost of goods sold in this business is essentially ZERO, the value is in how it's processed.
The only people achieving enriched-lives through these services are the few people of TruFina, and the dating sites they buddy-up with to resell your information packaged as a 'certification'. You can expect it to cost between $3 and $10 per month to have the likes of ChoicePoint and TruFina muck around with the data elements of your life and resell them as more than they are. They profit from your existance - an existance, as stated above - that almost anyone who knows enough about you can mimic and assert as their own.
Yes, with enough easy guesses, someone could play with services like TruFina through trial-and-error to determine enough correct answers about your life to become you - not only on TruFina and dozens of dat-ing sites, but carry that information into TSA ID systems and become you, ready to fly without the scrutiny of secondary screening to see if you've got stick matches in your socks.
The more these trivial, unregulated players in the identity and trust business put weak systems out there, the LESS SECURE Americans will be in the long run, and I'm not sure they will prevent as many priceless broken hearts as they will take your money. The likes of TruFina are not only Truly False, Truly Farce, they are Truly Frightening.
If true love can be bought through a weak identity scam, it's no surprise that anyone would sell themselves out as the romance shill.
There’s been a recent craze of establishing and asserting a verified identification as a badge of honor to display through the course of on-line dating. The concept is ripe with good intentions – either to make money, or provide tacit assurance to prosepct dates and mates that the person behind the flirtations is real – but there could be unwanted con-sequences long-term.
At least in the case of TruFina.com, anyone who knows anything about me, has rifled my trash can, or lived with me, can obtain and claim a TruFina identity as if they were me, associated with any email address they choose. Just how many 'me' are there out there, could there be, and who cares?
Obviously the folks at TruFina.com knows little or nothing about identity verification, identity theft, fraud, nor on-line dating, yet they claim, as other such services do, that you will gain some advantage that will ultimately protect you, me, or a prospective mate, from dealing with the wrong people. Such services assume that we’ll trust them and the sources of their data, to be reliable, accurate and looking after our best interests.
Unfortunately these services lure people into a false sense of trust, validation, verification and protected identity - all through a weak one-sided "give me your information, I'll make sure who you are and certify that claim."
Aside from possibly storing your personal data for untold future purposes, they are doing nothing more than a cursory lookup of readily available information from the likes of a Equifax or ChoicePoint - data brokers and information banks. They buy and collect information from various sources and re-sell it in many different forms – you may be familiar with them if you’ve had a pre-employment background check run on you – your employer must tell you and the company must share with you what they provided. We have no prior or accurate knowledge of or control over the source or validity of the information they have. Given that ChoicePoint's database was recently compromised, we should have no trust that they aren't storing and distributing false information about anyone.
None of what TruFina or any of the other identity certification services offer could have prevented the financial loss the group of initial developers suffered through the unscrupulous practices of TruFina's founders. They new without question the identity of the people that became TruFina and made hollow promises and left invoices unpaid. If you want trust, security, comfort, peace, love and eternal happiness, TruFina is not the place to go nor trust for it. But wait, there's more...
We are seeing more and more issues and layers of 'trust' thrust before us, based on no more than one web-front operation buying data from another web-front operation that collects unqualified, unverified data from several other unknown sources. We jump into a tangled web woven by others unknown and consider it 'trust' because they have a trustworthy-looking web site, an official looking certification logo, and offer a lot of fancy words about privacy.
Information brokers such as ChoicePoint are under no legal or recognized ethical scrutiny to ensure the data they acquire and distribute is accurate, much less if it can be compromised or if some of the records are totally false. Further, in the case of many such operations, the pro-grams are written off-shore in places that have no ethics much less agreements about what happens to the data they handle - your data - which may be in China, Hong Kong, India, Egypt, Russia... Do you know where your data is and who's playing with it?
What does this this type of asserted and assumed 'trust' do for an on-line dater? That depends on other dater's requirements for 'trust', which has less to do with your Social Security number, who previously used your present address, and whether or not you got a speeding ticket last month than it does with how you behave and others perceive you in specific contexts - that and silly human emotion, neither of which can be applied for and certified by an on-line database derieved from an-other on-line database derived from... an endless stream of unqualified, unmanageable data sources.
Of all the friends and associates I've discussed on-line dating reality with, and those I have 'met' on-line in the course of research, the type of assurances they rely on, and what would improve the quality of their on-line dating quests leading to dates in real-life, an identity check was not high on the list.
Interestingly enough - not one of them has ever asked a real-life date to see a driver's license, Social Security card, and a list of past occupants of their current home - before the first date or after the wedding - whether they became acquainted on-line or at the local coffee shop.
Their criteria? Chemistry. Behavior. Communication. Circumstances. Experience. Intuition. Reality. But not ID cards and certifications!
The significance, or insignificance of this 'identity' dilemma must not be lost on anyone either observing or patronizing it. This is a simple attempt to make money preying on and playing with the hearts, souls, hormones, emotions and pocketbooks of over 40 million generally nice, well-meaning people who turn to the likes of Match.com, Yahoo! Personals and such instead of the local bar scene for companionship.
The data they are 'selling' has little or no true financial value except what someone is willing to pay to dig it up and report it, but it is invaluable to those of us who the data is about. Aside from the Internet connections and servers and programming that mangle the data, the cost of goods sold in this business is essentially ZERO, the value is in how it's processed.
The only people achieving enriched-lives through these services are the few people of TruFina, and the dating sites they buddy-up with to resell your information packaged as a 'certification'. You can expect it to cost between $3 and $10 per month to have the likes of ChoicePoint and TruFina muck around with the data elements of your life and resell them as more than they are. They profit from your existance - an existance, as stated above - that almost anyone who knows enough about you can mimic and assert as their own.
Yes, with enough easy guesses, someone could play with services like TruFina through trial-and-error to determine enough correct answers about your life to become you - not only on TruFina and dozens of dat-ing sites, but carry that information into TSA ID systems and become you, ready to fly without the scrutiny of secondary screening to see if you've got stick matches in your socks.
The more these trivial, unregulated players in the identity and trust business put weak systems out there, the LESS SECURE Americans will be in the long run, and I'm not sure they will prevent as many priceless broken hearts as they will take your money. The likes of TruFina are not only Truly False, Truly Farce, they are Truly Frightening.
