Adult FriendFinder
| Adult Friend Finder | |
|---|---|
| legal form | FriendFinder Networks Inc . |
| founding | 1996 |
| Seat | Palo Alto , California |
| Branch | Sex industry |
Adult FriendFinder (AFF) is an internet dating site for sexual contacts from the Penthouse Media Group .
In contrast to comparable dating sites, women have to purchase premium memberships for a fee. According to its own information, the contact exchange has over 40 million members worldwide.
history
The website was first founded in 1996 by the American Andrew Conru as a conventional online dating platform under the name "FriendFinder" in Palo Alto , California (one year after the non-commercial Craigslist ) and is thus one of the longer existing Internet contact exchanges. When the founder noticed that many users were uploading revealing photos, he copied the website and named it "Adult-Friendfinder". The two dating platforms now exist in parallel. Other sites serving the erotic niche quickly followed , including Alt.com, Bondage.com and Outpersonals.com for homosexuals . A German version has existed since 2000.
Conru sold the company to the Penthouse Group in 2007 for $ 500 million. In September 2013, the company filed for and announced its Chapter 11 insolvency under American bankruptcy law. The company's debt was $ 411 million. By filing for bankruptcy, the Friendfinder network wanted to reduce the existing debt by EUR 255 million. Adult Friendfinder is not affected by the bankruptcy and can continue to be used.
According to the Alexa ranking , “Adult FriendFinder” was the 46th most visited website worldwide in September 2008, 70th in Germany, 327th in the USA in November 2013, 1130th in Germany and 488th worldwide.
Data leaks in 2015 and 2016
In 2015, Adult FriendFinder was hacked and 3.9 million customers were affected by the data breach . The data are e-mail addresses, dates of birth, parts of the postal address, and sexual preferences. Other data included gender, region, IP addresses , race, relationship status, sexual orientations, spoken language and user names. With the help of a search engine, some of the real names and addresses of the users could be found out from this data. The database circulated on the Internet.
In November 2016, the media reported another data leak. This time the databases of the FriendFinder Network were affected, to which Adult FriendFinder belongs. Accordingly, the network was hacked in October 2016, with Adult Friendfinder alone, almost 340 million customers were affected. The data consists of user names, email addresses and data of the last website visit of the user (IP address, VIP membership, browser setting) and whether the user had bought something. The hackers also captured the respective passwords, some of which were available in clear text or which were hashed using the insecure SHA-1 function .
criticism
Whether the gender distribution given by the operators is correct is the subject of ongoing discussions. There are also reports that orphaned user profiles are deliberately left in the user database and that an unusually large number of members, even for such platforms, are professional prostitutes who are looking for “customers”, ie who demand money from a certain point in time when contact is initiated. Other profiles are 'scam', i.e. fake profiles with profile pictures downloaded from the Internet, which are used to access e-mail addresses or to interest members in other websites.
As with most dating services, there is a free membership option (basic profile), but thousands of users report problems with both free and paid memberships. A free membership only entitles you to create your own profile, but not to contact other members, for which a silver or gold membership is necessary. Many ex-members report excessive restrictions that prevented them from using the site effectively. In 2004 and 2005, a suspected former employee on "the Ripoff Report" made serious allegations of misleading and illegal practices against the operators. He reports, among other things, of an artificial inflation of the member database through fake profiles, simulating chat activity through computer-generated chat messages (sending chat messages from the chat application archives) and programs that send e-mails from fake profiles.
literature
- Robert McMillan: AdultFriendFinder settles pop-up adware charges. In: PC World. December 6, 2007. (online version)
- Jim Hopkins: 'Penthouse' makes $ 500M hookup with social site Various. In: USA Today. December 31, 2007. (online version)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Company website ( Memento from September 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Interview with Andrew Conru
- ↑ FriendFinder Networks files for bankruptcy
- ↑ FriendFinder Networks insolvent
- ↑ Alexa Ranking adultfriendfinder.com (Retrieved November 6, 2013.)
- ↑ Alexa Ranking adultfriendfinder.com (Retrieved September 19, 2008.)
- ↑ Fabian A. Scherschel: Adult Friend Finder sex exchange hacked, user data distributed in the network. heise.de , May 22, 2015, accessed on November 14, 2016.
- ^ Troy Hunt: Adult Friend Finder. haveibeenpwned.com, accessed November 14, 2016.
- ↑ Hans-Peter Schüler: Another hack of the sex exchange Adult Friend Finder. heise.de from November 13, 2016, accessed on November 14, 2016.
- ↑ Sexual secrets for hundreds of millions exposed in largest hack of 2016. ( Memento from January 12, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) leakedsource.com November 13, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016.
- ↑ Zack Whittaker: AdultFriendFinder network hack exposes 412 million accounts. ZDNet November 13, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016.
- ↑ Adult Friend Finder: Is It Really Involved In A Scam? In: streetdirectory.com. Retrieved January 12, 2016 .
- ↑ Adult Friend Finder Dating Site Review - Adult Friendfinder
- ↑ "Report: Andrew Conru, Friendfinder Network, Alt.com, AdultFriendFinder.com, Passion.com, Xmatch.com" Ripoff Report November 19, 2004
- ↑ Fake Profile Class Action Lawsuit Investigation ( Memento from August 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive )