Zoosk Misfire with New Year Infographic

January and February are the biggest months in the year for online dating sites, which means they all want to prove to us just how great they are.  As a result, it’s the season of infographics (something you’ll have noticed from a number of my recent posts).

However, when I saw this recent one from Zoosk … I couldn’t help but feel they’ve misfired with the publicity ideas.

Yes, we know that sites and apps use data from our pages and messages to learn about us … normally with a view to showing us adverts tailored to our lives.  However, I don’t know about you, but the section of this infographic, discussing ‘most talked about TV show’ and ‘most talked about music in messages’, combined with ‘most mentioned buzz words in messages’ all just feels a bit dystopic to me.

In case you were in any doubt, there is 1 thing you need to know about Online Dating in 2015 – and it’s that Big Brother is watching you … and he’s reading every message you send on Zoosk! (For PR purposes, obviously!)

 

UPDATE – Zoosk were very quick to contact me, and have the following to say about the infographic –

“Ethics aside, it is not possible — given the enormous volume of data — to manually read through the messages or profiles required to calculate these statistics. In this and all of our data studies, Zoosk’s data scientists use industry-standard data mining software. As these statistics concern the entire population at large, no individual user’s data was particularly scrutinized and no identifying information such as email address or phone number was considered.”