Match.com Loses My Data, is Completely Unapologetic

Update: It’s been months and the issues still hasn’t been resolved. Also, Match.com just charged my card for another round of membership even though they clearly promised me on the phone that they would not bill me for their services until my testimonials were returned to me.

When Andy and I broke up a few months ago, I thought that it might be fun to try out Match.com and see what kinds of fun people I could meet. My big cousin used it back in the day when she was single. We’d have hours of fun sifting through all the guys who would ping her and giggling. I thought it could be a good time.

Match recently launched a couple of new feature that are ostensibly supposed to respond to the threat posed by Facebook and MySpace by making the site more social network-y. One of these allows users to ask their friends to write short testimonials that will appear on their profile.I asked a couple of my friends to write me testimonials. They both wrote funny, endearing blurbs. I even had a couple of cute potential matches reference the testimonials in their messages to me. “Score one for Match.com,” I thought to myself.

Then the testimonials vanished. They weren’t available in my testimonials management dashboard. They weren’t available on my profile. I filed a tech support ticket.

Twenty-four hours later, I got a canned response:

We received your inquiry regarding technical difficulties you experienced on the site.

Please accept our apology for any inconvenience that has been caused due to difficulties experienced on the Match.com website.

We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to alert us of the issue. Please be assured that we will work to resolve this as quickly as possible.

For immediate answers to most common questions, please visit our help section at: http://www.match.com/help/help.aspx.

Since I wasn’t actually able to discuss my problem with a human being through the Internet, I decided to work the old-fashioned way. I called them at 1-800-92-Match.

After waiting on hold for about half an hour, I spoke to Kenisha. I explained my situation. She asked me if it would be alright if she logged in as me to see if she could find the testimonials.

That really caught my attention. I was very surprised to learn that there is no back-end security system to prevent Match.com employees from simply logging into people’s accounts. I remember when it was widely speculated in the blogosphere that a similar security hole existed over at Facebook. Of the rumor, Nick O’Neill wrote:

I cannot start to explain how bad of a business practice this is. Facebook is going to be in some serious trouble as they rush to build an internal system for restricting access to information. A large portion of the money that Facebook is supposedly raising is going to end up being spent on legal fees. All I can say is wow!

Although I was skeptical, I gave her permission to log in in the hopes that she could fix the problem. She poked around in my account for a good ten minutes and found nothing. She then proceeded to tell me that the reason I couldn’t see them was because my friends had probably approved them to appear on their profiles.

I was really confused for a moment. Then I realized that Kenisha thought I was the one writing the testimonials. Flabbergasted, I explained again that my friends had written testimonials for me, not the other way around. She put me on hold for another ten minutes, then came back and said that she had no way of retrieving them and that she would refer the problem to technical support.

At this point, I was really fuming. I’d gone out on a limb and asked two of my friends to take the time to write something about me. Then those statements vanished without a trace. It had taken 24 hours for technical support to get back to me with even a canned response. And after waiting half an hour on hold, I was talking to an airhead who had absolutely no ability or authority to help me.

I told Kenisha that I work in the social media industry. I explained that I was floored by the poor quality of the product they had just launched.

She told me defensively, “well, it’s new. Sometimes new things take a while to work right.”

“You’re talking about a beta, right?”

Silence.

“You know, a beta. When you launch a new service and you’re testing it with a live audience to work out the kinks?”

“Yes.”

“Well then it should say ‘beta’ on it. It says ‘new!’ It doesn’t say ‘beta.’”

“Well, it sounds better to say ‘new’ than it does to say ‘beta.’”

I couldn’t believe I was talking to a company with “dot com” in the name.

After about ten more minutes of going around in circles, Kenisha assured me that I would hear from technical support very soon and that Match would not bill me for their services until the issue was resolved. Realizing that there was absolutely no point to the near hour-long call I had just made, I hung up in disgust.

The bottom line: Match has a great membership, but their technology is shoddy, their privacy practices are abysmal and their customer support is even worse.