"I can assure you that if this is something consumers are interested in, we would have offered it," she said. "This is a solution in search of a problem."
"We always tell our members, 'Dating is dating. Every time you meet a stranger, you need to do all the things you do normally. Be cautious.' These are all things women do every day when they meet new men."
Online dating does have some crucial distinctions, said Michigan Assistant Attorney General Jim Howell, who sponsored the background check bill last year when he was a Republican state legislator. Meeting in a bar, Howell said, gives someone the chance "to visibly see the person and come up with some judgment, though it may be an incorrect one. Whereas the online thing, God only knows what this person is saying."
True.com uses Rapsheets.com, an online background check service owned by Choicepoint Inc. that claims to have files on more than 170 million people. Alpharetta, Ga.-based Choicepoint is one of the nation's largest commercial sources of personal information about Americans, and has few rivals that provide as much detailed information.
Despite that pipeline, Barry Steinhardt, a data privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union, cautioned against trusting criminal background search services for reliable data. "You have every problem from names getting mixed up to the information being out of date," he said. Consumers of such data, he said, "should be aware that they're buying a defective product."
Bill Whitford, vice president of sales for Workplace Solutions, the Choicepoint division that runs Rapsheets.com, said that "there is no panacea on background checks."
"To do that you would have to check 3,100 courthouses on an almost daily basis," he said. He added that Rapsheets's data is updated more frequently than some government sources, including the National Crime Information Center's computerized index used by federal, state and local law enforcement authorities.
According to May, the sponsor of the Virginia proposal, several members of the Virginia Assembly committee that rejected the bill "started to see it as an unfair competitive advantage for one dating service over another."
"I don't think they disagreed with the intent, which was to basically prevent or reduce the number of unfortunate incidents that occur with online dating," May said.
Committee member Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax) said he found the proposal to "be a little much."
"To think that you require a criminal background check is a little over the top. I think there's been some nightmarish stories, but I don't think that is unique to Internet dating. I felt like it was, frankly, overregulation and not an area where the government needs to jump in with both feet."
