Surprise! You're on a dating site!

Online dating is more popular than ever before, and is becoming big business, but there are plenty of people happy to keep their social interactions "in real life" only. One website is ready to change all of that and create profiles for everyone scraped from publicly available databases.

Jordan said the site would soon host some 340 million profiles after scraping information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites to create new dating profiles.

Gotham Dating Partners hoped to position itself as a dating service as well as a "public information source" for individuals and corporations needing accurate information on US citizens, Jordan said.

The site announced that the changes would "in no way affect our international clients". But Jordan said any online, public information - including information about Australians - would be used.

Jordan did not expect to face any privacy issues by aggregating publicly available information, stating: "If the information is public, there are no privacy issues."

This concept has "bad idea" written all over it. It would instantly make stalking an effortless activity. Can you imagine the terror for victims of rape, when their attackers can find all about them so easily?

Here's hoping the CEO comes to his senses soon. If not, now is the time to go thru ALL of your privacy settings on ALL social networking sites and LOCK THEM DOWN. This is a good place to start.