Is it a healthy way to start a prospective dating relationship by googling everything you can about your date to dig up dirt?
On the one hand, I can see a use in digging up things like a criminal record, or past convictions, or pending court cases. But is it really a trusting, healthy way to begin a new relationship?
I get the feeling that people who do this (men and women) are looking not for a real person with real interests, but a perfect person on whom they can find nothing wrong. He plays video games? Forget it. He posts on the Washington Redskins forum? Hell with him. She’s a member of the Want A Baby Now message board? Screw that: did you read her post about The Rules and how it’s all about the rock? No way!
The more we move into the online dating world, as a society, the more I worry about the permanence of data available on the Internet. Would you want a prospective date to judge you based on your worst post on the SDMB, for instance?
Googling your date: healthy suspicion or paranoia?
The last time I dated was before teh internet tube things had been invented, but I don’t see any harm in researching a date. It would be to find out the bad things about him/her, but to find about interests, possible conversation toipics, etc. Back in the days when people socialised in RL rather than on My Space of Facebook, you might ask mutual friends, “What’s he/she like? What’s he/she interested in?” No harm in that.
I don’t google, but I do check the Circuit Court Access Program (CCAP). It will list any contacts with the law. I don’t necessarily share this fact with dates, but they don’t have to know. I invite them to CCAP me.
Well, yeah, asking mutual friends is one thing. Friends have tact and discretion, and they know when to share important things and when to withhold the irrelevant.
Googling on the internet is like sending out a survey to 100,000,000 people for any and all information dating back to 1990, no matter how insignificant. You’re going to turn up something on nearly everyone.
I see nothing wrong with it. Google, local court websites etc. Nothing wrong with having some idea of what you’re getting into.
I look at it this way, before the internet if you were going to date someone and knew a friend of theirs would you have asked them about the person? I certainly would have.
I felt bad about Googling a guy I met on Match before we went on a first date. Then he admitted he’d had an online PI look into me and paid $40 for a report that listed my past addresses and those of my family. Late in knowing him, he suggested that I was maybe a technology spy and so he put stuff over his windows to prevent ‘anyone’ seeing in. (He works for Microsoft security, so he’s already high-stepping into paranoia as it is.)
Just Googling (or Facebooking– is that what the kids are calling it) their name? Nah, nothing wrong with it. Anything more than that– private investigators, snooping out online IDS… yeah, maybe that’s a bit too much. I wouldn’t want a partner doing that let alone a stranger.
We’ve always lived in that world. Rape, murder, paedophilia, crime, embezzlement, divorce, lying, cheating, and adultery didn’t just get invented yesterday. We just have better tools now to excavate tiny pieces of information about a person’s history now, than we did before.
What frightens me the most about googling a prospective date is it’s so easy to jump to irrelevant conclusions over unimportant data.
Date was once in a flamewar on a message board: OMG, he has a bad temper and he’s an abuser.
Date once asked about Nazis: OMG, he’s a racist.
Date once answered a question about drug use: OMG, he’s an addict.
Date listens to Phish: OMG, he’s an addict.
I’ve seen it all the time on this message board, which is full of allegedly intelligent people. We jump to conclusions based on an incomplete out-of-context statement. Frankly, I don’t trust most people to come to a reasonable conclusion any more. How is googling not information overkill? How do you fail to worry about data you encounter?
In the unlikely event that I ever get involved in another relationship, it wouldn’t bother me one bit if she tried Googling me. Every time I Google myself, all that comes up under my real name is a list of science fiction convention websites.
Well, there are the two yahoo group emails that might give her the impression that I engage in certain kinky sexual activities…
Exactly. I read in a book recently where the author was musing about her taste in men and horrible dating history. She realized that, 200 years ago, her father would have been the gatekeeper keeping the crazies and the jerks and the perpetually starving artists out of her dating pool. Only those men which passed his rubric for “good husband” would be allowed to even meet her. Nowadays, we don’t have our fathers or matchmakers or Aunt Mildreds to do this work for us. We need to become our own gatekeepers. And, frankly, most of us suck at it.
And, out of your search results, how do you screen out the misses? There are many people with my real name, in many locations. How do you know which of them you just met on the plane?
I don’t Google out of ‘healthy suspicion or paranoia’ - just cos it’s fun and I’m nosy. I give my Myspace ID out anyway if I’m interested in meeting up with someone - they usually ask what I do then want to read some of my stuff.
Unexpected drawback though - I’ve plenty of stuff online so Googling my name will usually give links to site with some of my work. But a few years ago, on the prison drama Bad Girls there was a character with the same name as me (it’s not rare, but not too common either). I always worry that potential dates, or more importantly, potential employers, Google me, read the line ‘mudkicker, who was sentenced to life in prison aged 18 for brutally stabbing to death her own mother…’, and decide not to read further.
I know a couple of TV scriptwriters too, still trying to figure out who I might have pissed off…
Healthy suspicion or paranoia? Potentially, neither. There’s nothing healthy or unhealthy about it, it all depends on your reasons for doing it and your predispositions to react in certain ways if you see something that sticks out. I don’t really buy the rising trend of referring to ‘trust’ as a positive or negative trait of the truster, completely independent of the person being trusted. Why should one express one’s ‘trust’ for a stranger (or a close friend or whoever) by restricting oneself information that’s potentially useful and readily available to anyone? If I’m going to jump to conclusions about the findings without consulting the party first or thinking about possible missed information, why then, that is a character flaw on my part, or the part of whoever does such a thing.
For myself, I’ve not googled, but been directed to others’ blogs and websites, and directed people to my own. I might google if I were bored or curious, nothing ominous. Nothing bad’s come of it so far. I think it’s important to keep aware at all times that anything I do on the internet is public record, especially on sites I have no control over, anyway.
It’s a bit disturbing. I once met a guy through a mutual acquaintance in a public setting, and chatted him up for a few hours. HOURS.
And then within the next few days I got an email asking me about my entire goddamned online history. :eek: Just from the email address I gave him to discuss lending some books, mind you. And that address was not universally connected to my presence, either, so he was doing serious sleuthing.
I recognize that it’s natural to want to know about the people you’re meeting, but on a few hours’ acquaintance? Interrogating the subject about their entire history?
I agree that trust, deep trust, should be earned, and it is earned by being trustworthy on the part of the trustee. It’s not a trait of the truster.
On the other hand, I cannot agree that googling every and any piece of information on a prospective date is healthy. To me, it shows an obsession for finding a person who is perfect, with nothing wrong at all. Every person has flaws, and a google search is increasingly bound to find one or two on anyone eventually — and the information may stick around for a dozen years, if not longer. Does anybody really expect to find somebody perfect? If not, why google?
I see nothing wrong with it. If a girl tried googling my real name though, it would be hard to find anything out since my name is of the Mike Smith variety.
Well, sure, but that seems to refer just to a certain type of person who googles other people. And there are certainly certain people who really should leave it alone, and related character flaws, like red flags for people who may not respect other people’s privacy in other aspects, or people who refuse to move on from appropriately resolved transgressions, but you don’t want to conclude that every person who does it is doing it for one particular reason, yeah?
I’ll admit, though, if I hear that someone looked me up on something I get all paranoid, even if I know there’s nothing bad there, and start going back through all the content in my own head, which is incredibly distracting. Being observed certainly affects people, so I guess whether and how you tell someone you googled them becomes a point of interest as well.
