Once upon a time, when people still read books, George Orwell introduced a character whose archetypes would pervade science and dystopic fiction for decades before managing to cross the coveted threshold into pop culture lexicon: Big Brother. While the idea behind this concept refers largely to government abuse of power, this all-pervading source for gathering and dispersing information means much less today than it did when the novel 1984 was first published in 1949. The advent of the internet heralded Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook, perhaps the holy trinity of the high digital seas, and with them came many things, not the least of which was an insentient and non-conscious iteration of Big Brother.
Of course, I’m not talking about writing a science fiction novel when I mention these topics, since I write under the aegis of the Examiner’s online dating mantle. As much as the internet can help you date, it can help other people spoil your experience; on some sites, fake profiles are more prevalent than real ones, and their success often depends on the fact that you haven’t had the chance to see every single model that has pictures available on the internet. Thankfully, Big Brother is now available to point a stern, instantaneous finger at any profile charlatan.
Meet Tineye. It’s a simple site that offers one major, indispensable service: reverse image lookup. It’s so easy to use a Google image search to type in a few words and find almost any picture, but how many services allow you to provide the image, only to return results that can help you identify its content? Fake profiles on dating sites come in many iterations; empties, solicitors, sex changers, and spies can blend in thanks to the cover provided by stolen pictures. Solicitors in particular, a group that represents cam girls, phishers, and site bots, require the type of tantalizing pictures that can best be provided from modeling websites that feature many pictures of the same girls clad in a variety of poses with an amazing vocabulary of staging choices that could theoretically provide a sliding scale to demarcate any person’s threshold on nudity.
So now, the poor saps who have signed up for dating services based on the strength of a few borrowed images attached to empty profiles (like me) don’t even have to think twice. Copying the image’s URL and pasting it in Tineye will expose approximately 90% of any site’s fake users.
Of course, there’s nothing like one’s own personal judgment, provided you’ve been around the internet long enough to smell a fake before their page can load. And no one can take away your choice to live in uncertainty of whether or not that that perfect looking woman is actually using internet dating despite the fact that your visual indicators should tell you that she wouldn’t need to. But why leave anything up to chance or dispute when Big Brother can take care of it for you?
For questions, opinions, advice, and website review suggestions, e-mail Bryan at onlinedatingexaminer@gmail.com. Questions and advice may be posted anonymously.
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