SwingLifestyle

Beware!

This site has major security and privacy problems, and grossly outdated technology. They lie to their members about it all, and have even banned Lifetime members who tried to discuss the problems constructively. Their "Customer Service" is an absolute travesty.

The most recent of many security/privacy lapses came to light earlier this month, when it was discovered that supposedly "private" member photos were easily accessible to anyone. The potential for this breach was known to SLS for years, and their response was not to fix it, but to squelch anyone who talked about it. For details, search on Reddit for Swinglifestyle.

They have now assured their members that the problem is fixed, and responded to customer concerns about credit card privacy by claiming that they don't retain CC data. Which is not very credible, since their membership options offer monthly-recurring automatic renewals on credit cards.

I would not believe a word these people say, especially about technology. The site is constantly experiencing glitches --sometimes major ones-- and the fixes often take months. The email system is circa 1995. The photo-handling and approval part had major problems for over a year; the forums suddenly had huge formatting problems that made them almost unreadable, and took many weeks to fix. Friends of ours tell me that they routinely receive emails from single-males, even though their profiles are supposed to be invisible to single male members. We used the privacy settings to block our profile from viewing by free members, yet we receive emails from free members who apparently can access our profile after all.

SLS shows contempt for their customers by deleting reports of these problems on their website discussion forum, and even by punishing or banning members who report the glitches. We have heard numerous horror stories from friends we trust who had the misfortune of dealing with the "Customer Service" woman. She apparently is both stupid and vindictive, and she has unsupervised authority to treat paying customers like crap.

The security breach of private pics was made worse by SLS adopting a policy a year ago, of plastering its own logo on members' pics whether the members wanted it or not. Several members complained about this practice in the website forum; no SLS person even responded to it for many months, and even then completely ignored the privacy concerns its members had expressed. Many of those posts expressing concern were simply deleted. We now refuse to upload any new face pics of ourselves, because we don't want our face pics (with a swinger-site logo superimposed) floating around. Especially, when SLS cares so little about privacy and security issues.

We have been members for five years and have met some nice people, but can no longer recommend SLS to anyone, even though it still is the largest. There are now much better sites, that don't have a policy of $#*!ting on their customers like SLS does.