Background

Dating websites are natural progression in the world of dating services. The services provided on a dating website are most reminiscent of personal ads in newspapers or video dating services from the 1980s. The main idea is that one person creates a profile that describes that person. This information can include standard demographic information (like age, height, or eye color), interests, pictures of the person, and other text. Once the profile is created, the person can then look at other profiles. For a fee, the person can contact other people and organize a date. Dating sites are quite popular and are no longer considered a fringe way of meeting people. Figure 1 below illustrates the overall scenario.

Figure 1: Overall scenario for InstantONS.

However, there could be problems with using a dating website. There is no way to verify the information about a person. For example, frequent complaints are that men on average added about 5 cm to their height and than most adjusted their weight down by a few pounds. Information about career, wealth, and cosmetic implants is as unreliable as weight and age information. Therefore, certified attributes with the capability of pseudonymous, unlinkable authentication constitute an interesting use case for FutureID, which is a cloud service for brokering digital identity attributes.

The InstantONS use case builds upon prior work from student case studies in location-based services privacy at the T-Mobile Chair for Mobile Commerce and Multilateral Security at Goethe University in Frankfurt [1] [2]. The case was latter extended into a use case in the ICT FP7 PRIME project [3]. At that time, the focus of the use case description was on privacy issues that arise from using location data in a dating scenario. Through the FutureID EU project, the accumulation of digitally verified personal attributes and identity brokerage were added to the scenario [5].

Use case details

The goal of the InstantONS use case is the use of certified identities with certain privacy properties along with certified attributes in the context of online dating web sites. The use case will illustrate the benefits of using FutureID technology for both privacy-friendly authentication as well as using certified attributes.

InstantONS uses many of the features of FutureID’s e-ID brokerage service. Below, they are summarized:

Service sign-up with an e-ID with InstantONS: Depending on the quality requirements and other business modalities, InstantONS will wish to accept new members based on a high-quality e-ID.

Age verification: Due to the nature of the business model, InstantONS doesn’t accept minors.

Collection of signed consent for information processing: By using electronic signatures, InstantONS collects the necessary informed consent for the user of personal data, e.g. for location data for value-added location-based services.

Attributes in the personal profile data base: Users describe themselves based on standardized forms where they indicate personal attributes such as income, physical parameters, age, marital status, number of children. FutureID can, with help of specialiced registration and certification parties, handle certified information by processing attribute-based credentials from e.g. public authorities provided for this case.

Special-interest attributes: Membership in special-interest associations can be processed based on attribute-based credentials.

Special, possibly sensitive medical information: (Absence of) transmittable diseases, fertility problems and cosmetic surgery/bodyshaping are information that might be of interest. By including medical certification providers, such features can be processed with FutureID as well.

Since dating activities are often considered sensitive to privacy, one of the most important features in the e-ID and privacy architecture of InstantONS is the separation of real identity and the pseudonyms and attributes used on the platform with other users. By involving attribute-based credentials with properties such as unlinkability and selective show, many of the attribute claims in the personal dating profile can actually be proven by selectively showing matching credentials. In Figure 2, FutureID acts as an identity infrastructure between the various certification authorities for personal attributes, and the InstantONS provider.

Figure 2: InstantONS usage of FutureID with various ID providers and attribute-based credentials

Value proposition

By using FutureID as a basis for identity and attribute exchange in dating applications, the full potential of e-ID interoperability will be released. By using existing e-IDs and by including attributes from various existing and new sources, the FutureID dating case illustrates the power of cross-border identity exchange. In particular, the following benefits will create value:

Use of existing e-ID infrastructures with strong identity assurance.
Inclusion of high-assurance attributes about persons with privacy-supporting protocols.
Stimulation of a market for certification of personal properties.
Increased confidence, customer experience and trust in the user profiles on InstantONS.
Increased use of open e-ID infrastructure.

InstantONS is, in addition, an application with high growth rates in the private internet application sector. It therefore has the potential to stimulate use of high-assurance e-IDs and ID attributes outside of the e-government domain, in particular with a technology-affine younger user population.

References

Rannenberg, K.; Albers, A.; Fritsch, L., Mobile Dating mit InstantONS – ein Informationssystem für mobilfunkunterstützes ad-hoc-Treffen. In Übung zur Veranstaltung "Wirtschaftsinformatik 2", Sommersemester 2004, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 2004.
Rannenberg, K.; Albers, A.; Radmacher, M., Mobile Dating mit InstantONS - Anwendungsszenario für die Übungen "Wirtschaftsinformatik 2", Sommersemester 2007. In Vorlesungsskript und Übungen zu "Wirtschaftsinformatik 2", Sommersemester 2007, Frankfurt am Main, 2007; p 4.
Fritsch, L.; Kohlweiss, M.; Radmacher, M.; Scherner, T. JWGFra contribution to PRIME D1.1a - LBS example scenarios, UML models and profiling/matching architecture model Goethe-University Frankfurt, T-Mobile Chair for Mobile Commerce and Multilateral Security: Frankfurt am Main, 12-Aug-2004, 2004; p 20.
PRIME Privacy and Identity Management for Europe. EU project PRIME.
Lothar Fritsch, Trenton Schulz: Business use case: InstantONS dating service, FutureID project use case proposal draft v.0.01, 1-Dec-2012.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.