Sunday, August 11, 2013

My answer to Legal Letter from Affinitas GmbH.



On August 7, 2013, I had received a Legal Letter from Affinitas GmbH. via local lawyers in Argentina.
Also, that August 7, 2013 in the afternoon, I received and read an email from the COO of Affinitas GmbH. from Germany (Mr. Michael Schrezenmaier) who said that there was indeed a bug in the software of Affinitas GmbH.'s online dating sites, so there was no overlap of the profiles suggested adjectives and I had been induced to suspect an anomalous situation since 12 July 2013, to think those such compatible suggested profiles were false.

Please read in his email saying:
"The truth is that you pointed us to a bug. We have setup our platform in a way that allows for a very fast internationalisation. The backbone is a long list of “keys” which need to be translated. Certain keys need to be mapped to each other in order to show the same information for sender and receiver of a certain item. In the case at hand we mapped the keys in a wrong way with the result that User A saw for example "affectionate" whereas User B (receiver) saw this term translated as "Romantic" (purely an example). "

I had immediately begun to delete/remove all posts about Affinitas GmbH., in my blog "Breaking the Online Dating Sound Barrier". The blog HowtoBreakOnlineDatingSoundBarrier was entirely deleted, and also I had deleted/erased my comments from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.



Affinitas GmbH.'s Management Team spent 25 days without giving any official explanation of the anomalies detailed in screenshots on suggested profiles sent to them at different times via email, that confused me and led me to think they were behaving badly. If they had answered almost immediately with a valid explanation, easily believable (in this case a bug in the algorithm affecting the mapping of adjectives) about that anomaly mismatch in the adjectives at several sites like eDarling Chile and Mexico and EliteSingles Ireland and UK; I would had never written so many posts and comments about that suspicious situation.
First email from me was sent on Friday, July 12, 2013 at night from Argentina (it was Saturday July 13, 2013 in Germany) so from July 12, 2013 to August 7, 2013 there are 25 days, taking into account the time difference of 5 hours. (Summer time in Germany). Never before has anyone from Affinitas GmbH. bothered to answer any of my many emails sent on different days. If I had been told almost immediately (purely for example) "Hey Fernando, we have a bug in the algorithm that does not match the correct adjectives in the descriptions of the profiles. We are trying to fix it. Thanks for discovering that anomaly and informing us so soon" I would had never written so much about that anomaly. In addition, each time I sent an email to Affinitas GmbH., I also copied to several experts from the Online Dating Industry and those people were also surprised that Affinitas GmbH.'s Management Team did not officialy answer to screenshots sent in those emails.

350 people work at Affinitas GmbH., but Fernando Ardenghi's eyes were the ones who discovered that problem of mismatches in adjectives.
 In the era of Internet heyday it is surprising a German company took 25 long days to respond to a serious anomaly.

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