The Online Dating Safety Checklist

Most online dating goes fine. The risks that show up are boring and repetitive, which is good news, because boring repetitive risks can be handled with a checklist rather than with vigilance. This is that checklist — privacy first, because the information you give away early is what makes everything else possible.

None of it is about treating strangers as threats. It is about making sure that if one conversation out of fifty turns out badly, the damage stops at the conversation. That is written for everyone here: the patterns below affect men, women and non-binary people, and the assumption that only one group needs a safety page is part of why the others do not report.

What your photos give away

Nobody needs technical skill to read a photograph. They need attention, and someone with bad intentions has plenty.

• Your workplace. A lanyard, a branded mug, a visible reception desk, a view from a window that only exists on one floor of one building.
• Your gym. Equipment branding and floor colours are surprisingly identifiable, and gym photos come with a schedule attached — the same time, the same days.
• Your street. House numbers, the neighbour's door, a local shop sign, the recycling bins, a distinctive tree. A photo taken on your doorstep can put someone on your doorstep.
• Your car. Registration plates in driveway photos, plus the make and colour.
• Children. School uniforms and logos are the specific problem. If children appear at all in your dating photos, crop the uniform, and think hard about whether they belong there before you have met anyone.
• Your routine. Four photos at the same café tell a stranger where you will be on Saturday morning.

Most large platforms strip location metadata from uploads, but not every messaging app does, and screenshots and re-shares travel unpredictably. Assume any photo you send privately can be saved. That is not a moral judgement about what you send — it is a fact about how files work, and the useful response is to decide what you are comfortable with rather than to assume good faith on the other end.

While you are auditing, it is worth reading your profile text with the same eye. Our guide to writing a dating profile that works across cultures covers the appealing version of this; the safety version is simply that your employer's name, your gym, your neighbourhood and your commute do not need to be in there.

Phone numbers, accounts and the second-number trick

Your phone number is not a contact detail any more. It is an identity key. It links to your messaging apps — where a stranger can usually see your profile photo, your status and sometimes your name — and it is the recovery route for a long list of accounts. It also appears in enough leaked databases to make reverse lookup easy.

Get a second number. A cheap second SIM, a data-only eSIM that comes with a number, or an app-based number all work. Use it for dating apps and for early conversations. If something goes wrong, you retire the number instead of rebuilding your digital life.

Tighten your messaging privacy settings. On most apps you can restrict your profile photo, last-seen and status to saved contacts only. Do that before you hand out any number, second or not.

Separate the accounts. A dedicated email address for dating apps, and a username you have never used anywhere else. People do search usernames, and a handle reused from a forum you posted on in 2013 can produce an unnervingly complete biography.

Turn on two-factor authentication for the email address that dating apps send password resets to, and think twice about signing in with a social account, which can pull in more profile data than you expect.

What to hold back, and for how long

The point is not secrecy. It is sequencing: information should follow trust rather than lead it.

A few specifics that matter more than they look:

• Financial detail. Job titles that imply income, an inheritance, a property, a crypto holding, or a recent redundancy payout. This is the single most useful thing you can hand a fraudster — it is roughly the point in the romance scam script where some approaches escalate and others quietly stop.
• Security-question answers. Mother's maiden name, first pet, first school, the street you grew up on. These arrive disguised as charming getting-to-know-you questions and they are the standard account-recovery set.
• Travel dates. Do not announce that your flat will be empty from the 3rd to the 12th. Post the photos when you get back.
• Your children's names, school and routine. Not before you have met the person repeatedly and would happily introduce them to a colleague.

Sextortion: the pattern, and exactly what to do

The pattern is consistent enough to describe in one paragraph. Contact is fast and flattering. Within days, often hours, they steer towards intimate photos or a video call, and usually towards a different platform than the one you met on. They send something first to make it feel mutual — often a stolen image. They record. Then the tone changes completely: a demand for money, a short deadline, and a screenshot of your followers or colleagues to prove they have collected your contacts. Sometimes they claim to have hacked your device, which is almost never true.

This happens to people of every gender. Police forces in several countries have issued specific warnings about young men and teenage boys being targeted, because that group is both heavily targeted and least likely to report.

Nothing about being in this situation makes you foolish or reckless. You were targeted by an operation that does this at scale, and the shame is the product.

Meeting in public: the boring parts that work

• You choose the place, or at least you agree it together, and it is somewhere busy at that hour with staff present.
• Daylight or early evening for the first one, and keep it short by design. Ninety minutes with the option to extend beats an open-ended evening you have to escape.
• Your own transport, both ways. Do not be collected from home and do not get into their car on a first meeting. Anyone who insists on picking you up from your address, before you have given your address, has told you something useful.
• One person knows the plan — who, where, when, and when you will check in. Live location sharing for a few hours costs nothing.
• Keep your phone charged and take a power bank. A dead phone is what turns a mildly bad evening into a genuinely difficult one.
• Mind your drink, and order your own. If you leave the table, do not come back to the same glass.
• No home addresses, either direction, and no going back to a flat on the first meeting if you have any hesitation at all.
• Have an exit line ready and permission to use it. "I'm going to head off, thanks for the drink" is complete. You do not owe a reason, and a person who demands one is confirming your instinct.

If the person you are meeting lives in another country, the logistics change substantially and so do the stakes. That version has its own guide: travelling to meet someone for the first time.

One last thing. Everything above is designed to be forgettable — set the second number up once, fix the privacy settings once, get into the habit of telling a friend where you are. Done properly, safety is admin you do at the start so you can stop thinking about it and pay attention to the person in front of you, which is the whole point of going out in the first place.