Ethical and Legal Issues

Privacy:

Because of the greater amount of information about the men and women in our agency, safeguarding your privacy becomes an extremely important concern. We could not function if our clientele, you, are not completely confident that your personal information will be shared ONLY with those whom you designate. Your profile information and questionnaire answers are only accessible by the women who have become members of our agency. Your payment information and street address is not shared with anyone. Your profile information will never be sold to mass marketers, survey firms, or any other person or institution. The only circumstance under which your history with us would be disclosed is to law enforcement under compulsion by court subpoena.

Our women members do not want their profile information or images to be shared with those they have not designated. In addition, we do not want our copyrighted site content to be used in ways we do not authorize or have not intended. To protect our women members, and ourselves, we use software that hinders the saving or printing of any image or content from our site.

Violence:

Feminist groups in the United States have achieved a great deal of success in persuading legislatures to enact laws that limit the operations of introduction agencies in the United States. The IMBRA law is a recent example. The assumption is that domestic violence is more likely in international marriages than in domestic American marriages due to greater perceived inequality between the partners of an international marriage. This belief arises from two recent highly publicized cases of violence towards non-American brides from the former Soviet Union and the Philippine Islands. The Washington state case of Indle King murdering Anastasia King, neé Slovena, in September of 2000 has been the subject of a documentary and frequently broadcast in the US on national television. The supporters of IMBRA have not yet provided anyone with statistics and data that can show that these incidents are not isolated, and that domestic violence is endemic to international marriages.

In order to aid in the prevention and forestalling of further inroads on the legal operations of this industry, we ask the men to state in their profiles whether they have committed, or have been accused of committing, an act of violence against a woman. A man cannot become a member of this agency without answering that question. We do not verify your claim. However, be aware that should law enforcement become involved with you and a woman from our agency, and it is discovered that you misrepresented yourself to the lady in question through lying to us in your profile, your legal difficulties will increase exponentially! IMBRA now requires international agencies to go beyond that standard for American citizens and permanent residents.

Maturity:

Because the objective of this introduction service is marriage for our clients, both the men and women who have profiles with our agency must be at least the age of majority, 18 years of age in most jurisdictions. Men using introduction services have complained about the low levels of emotional maturity and life experience of very young women. The women who participate in these services have complained about the identical lack of emotional maturity and life experience when meeting very young men. To meet our mission of delivering the most satisfying international introduction experience available, and to avoid some of the legal and ethical challenges associated with serving those who are as young as 18 years old, we have decided to allow only the profiles of men and women who are at least 21 years of age.

We recommend that, unless you yourself have a low level of emotional maturity and limited life experience, you deal with members who have at least reached their mid-20's.

Sharing Contact Information with Friends:

A difficulty address sellers have is that a person can buy contact information from the agency and then re-sell it to friends or acquaintances. There is no way to stop this. A consequence of the greater information sharing in our agency between men and women, is that sharing contact information with friends loses its value. The women members are notified when a man has purchased her contact information. She is able to view his profile and thus is expecting contact from a specific man. If her contact information is shared and a man who is not a member of our agency contacts her, she will know this is not the man she was expecting to hear from and she will have no prior information about him. She will not respond to his contact.

Sharing user names and passwords:

Very often friends will let each other access their accounts by sharing their user names and passwords with each other. This practice is prohibited in the terms of use section of most account contracts. This is a problem for all computer oriented operations as it is very difficult to enforce. We also have such a requirement but cannot enforce it. If you let your friends have access to your account with us so they can browse the profiles and look at the pictures, keep them on a tight leash. Only one user can log into an account at a time. If you give a friend your user name and password and he logs in, you cannot log in as well until he logs out. If, as is usually the case, he gives your user name and password to one of his friends, and so on, and so on, then soon your account will have several users logging in all the time. You will not be able to log into your own account when you want, and will be paying for others to enjoy our site. You will only be able to close that account and open a new one. Avoid the unnecessary expense and the unnecessary hassle. Do not share your user name and password with anyone!