Online dating platform Venntro has pledged to be more upfront about how it shares personal information

Venntro Media Group Ltd (Venntro), which has over 55 million users worldwide and supplies online dating services through just under 3,500 websites, has been investigated by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) over concerns about misleading claims and how it used people’s personal data.

Venntro operates dating sites on behalf of major media outlets and other organisations, including both general and specialist sites that were marketed to people looking for a partner with a specific hobby, interest, ethnicity, locality or religion.

The CMA discovered that people who signed up to Venntro’s websites were often unaware their information would be stored in a central database and that their profiles might be visible on the company’s other dating sites. It also saw complaints from people who said they had signed up for sites featuring explicit adult content without realising that they were doing so.

The CMA was therefore concerned people could have signed up for a specialist site, yet some of the profiles they saw and people they paid to interact with were not actually subscribers to that site and did not necessarily share their interests. It was also worried that in certain circumstances messages sent between these people would not be received.

As a result of the CMA’s investigation, Venntro has made legally binding commitments to make it clear to people before they sign up that it will share their information on other sites and obtain their full agreement to do this. It must provide a list of these sites and will not place members’ profiles on sites containing explicit adult material without their additional active consent.

Venntro must also make it easier for people to delete their profile when their subscription ends and not make misleading claims about the number of members on its sites, or the number of messages sent through those sites.