That may be their assumption (clearly is, given the evidence), but I think it's a pretty poor one and it's certainly off-putting as a potential user. A dating

That may be their assumption (clearly is, given the evidence), but I think it's a pretty poor one and it's certainly off-putting as a potential user. A dating site contains, practically by definition, a fair bit of personal information. It's not online banking, but there's a lot of ugly stuff that an attacker could do if they could break into a large number of user accounts, and particularly if they could de-anonymize those accounts. POF was pretty clearly sacrificing security -- which in this context means the potential privacy of their users -- in order to get more engagement and build userbase. Bluntly: they were taking risks with their users' data in order to build their business. That's not terribly cool in my book, even though I can see why they might have made the decision. The fact that it's understandable doesn't mean that it's right.