Blind Dating By Bluetooth Goes Live

Further to my column on bluesnarfing, a Marseilles company called Kangourouge has launched a service which, as far as I can work out, uses the same sort of Bluetooth vulnerability catalogued by AL Digital and others, namely Bluejacking.

It’s called ProxiDating (interestingly, Google doesn’t like the word and suggests ‘peroxidation’ instead, which is presumably the excuse one offers if the first date doesn’t work out, as in ‘Sorry I can’t go out with you tonight I’m in a Domestic Hair Peroxidation Situation’.) Anyway, the blurb says:

Using bluetooth technology, ProxiDating allows you to meet people with common interests in pubs, restaurants, shops, clubs, discos, sports arenas, in fact, almost anywhere !

ProxiDating is a totally new way for single people to meet up instantly. All you need to do is install ProxiDating on your mobile phone, create your profile, enable bluetooth and wait for your dream date to appear. Whenever you come within about 15m of a person with a matching profile your phone will alert you !

Only people with matching profiles will be linked via their phones. ProxiDating automatically sends the text and image that you have defined to your potential date. In the same way, you will receive text and image from the matched partners phone… then its up to you…

Imagine, you are crossing the street when the girl/boy of your dreams passes before you, your phone buzzes and their face appears on your phone’s screen…

The website doesn’t offer much, so far, and most of the few pages there are, are empty.

Now I know people have been talking about this kind of service for a while, but I believe this might be the first to go live. Something called Serendipity was mentioned a few weeks back as a MIT Media Lab project but I haven’t seen anything hit the streets yet. (I’m ready to stand corrected on this, although I gave the MIT website a look.)

As pointed out elsewhere, this kind of system is not going to be popular with the service providers, not because it’s insecure, but because it’s not likely to make them any money. The software is network independent, since the interaction requires only the users to input their data and ‘find’ each other using Bluetooth. No network, no pinging back to the network to update or match profiles, no large amounts of money.

Which explains why the software costs $5. It’s a commercial version of the Brits’ own toothing fad, I guess.