  Online dating is an increasingly thriving business which boasts
billion-dollar revenues and attracts users in the tens of millions.
Notwithstanding its popularity, online dating is not impervious to worrisome
trust and privacy concerns raised by the disclosure of potentially sensitive
data as well as the exposure to self-reported (and thus potentially
misrepresented) information. Nonetheless, little research has, thus far,
focused on how to enhance privacy and trustworthiness. In this paper, we report
on a series of semi-structured interviews involving 20 participants, and show
that users are significantly concerned with the veracity of online dating
profiles. To address some of these concerns, we present the user-centered
design of an interface, called Certifeye, which aims to bootstrap trust in
online dating profiles using existing social network data. Certifeye verifies
that the information users report on their online dating profile (e.g., age,
relationship status, and/or photos) matches that displayed on their own
Facebook profile. Finally, we present the results of a 161-user Mechanical Turk
study assessing whether our veracity-enhancing interface successfully reduced
concerns in online dating users and find a statistically significant trust
increase.
