For $5K, Match.com Will Find Lookalikes of Your Ex

New facial-recognition service costs a pretty penny
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 19, 2014 1:31 PM CDT
Updated Jun 22, 2014 11:51 AM CDT
For $5K, Match.com Will Find Lookalikes of Your Ex
   (Shutterstock)

Match.com is rolling out a pricey new service that's causing some double-takes: It promises to match up clients with people who look like their exes. The premise is pretty simple: People send in photos of their former loves, and facial-recognition software then scans the possible matches available to find a close approximation. "People have a type and it's not necessarily about height or race or hair color, but a lot of it is about face shape," Talia Goldstein, founder of matchmaking service Three Day Rule tells Mashable. TDR is teaming up with Match.com on the service, which costs $5,000. Those who pony up also get a professional matchmaker assigned to their case, who will vet potential matches and even go on "pre-dates" to screen out duds.

Much of the reaction to this can be summed up thusly: "It's creepy as hell," writes Adam Clark Estes at Gizmodo. He wonders who will be more disturbed—your exes or your new partners who have been "robotically selected because they look like your ex and hand-curated so that you don't get bored over coffee?" But at the Washington Post, Catilin Dewey points out that dating sites already use all kinds of hidden algorithms, and this one seems relatively logical to her. Maybe it "strikes us as creepier than others because it’s the only one we can actually see." What's more, she tested things out by sending in three photos of male friends, and the results were "uncanny." See for yourself in the full post. (Click to read about a lovelorn mathematician who successfully cracked those logarithms.)

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