BBC Radio 4′s consumer programme You & Yours on Friday 6th January featured many concerns about the ethics and practices of Global Personals, the company which runs websites which facilitate and encourage people to have affairs.Click on the link below to listen to a 2 minute section of the programme which featured our campaign and Global Personal’s response to our accusation that their work is ‘toxic and ethically shabby’.

Faithfulness Matters on BBC Radio 4 

We believe that Global Personals illustrate very clearly in the programme their lack of concern for ethics or for how the websites which they operate affect people’s lives.

Before Christmas, Ross Williams, CEO of Global Personals appeared on BBC Radio 4′s You and Yours programme to talk about how successful and profitable the on-line dating business was.  A number of listeners got in touch with the Beeb afterwards to flag up the ethical concerns many have about the websites Global Personals run which encourage people to cheat on their partners.

So this week Jon Kuhrt was invited onto the show to be interviewed about the Faithfulness Matters campaign.  It is due to be broadcast on Friday 6th January at 12.00 midday.

Why this issue is important

We believe that faithfulness between people in committed relationships matters - for individuals, for families, for children and for our communities. We believe that commitment and honesty between couples is worth standing up.  So, we believe that running websites which encourage and facilitate people to have affairs is not legitimate business for a responsible company.  

It goes beyond simply an issue of personal choice because these ‘product’ directly and inherently involve damaging other people’s lives.  Everyone has experience of the real cost that affairs have for the partners and especially when children are affected.

The shabby ethics of Global Personals

Before Christmas, representatives from Faithfulness Matters, including someone whose husband had three affairs on websites like these, met with representatives from Global Personals at their lawyers.  The company dismissed our concerns and confirmed their intentions to continue to run and profit from websites which encourage and facilitate affairs.  Global Personals might be an innovative and profitable company but in terms of their ethics we believe they are shabby.  We are committed to highlighting their lack of ethics until they stop running sites like these.

How you can get involved:

1. Please read the Faithfulness Matters statement and if you agree with it, ping us a quick email on faithfulnessmatters@gmail.com.  You will join the growing list of supporters who want to support the campaign.
2. Listen to a 90 second audio recording of Susan’s story: the real cost of affairs websites – one woman whose family was ripped apart after her husband had affairs using sites like these
3. Encourage your MP to join the 30 other MPs who have signed the Early Day Motion in Parliament in support of Faithfulness Matters

Thanks for your support for Faithfulness Matters.

For any media enquiries about the campaign please also email faithfulnessmatters@gmail.com and we will come back to you as soon as we can.

Susan, a single mum with three children, is one of the activists involved in Faithfulness Matters.  She feels strongly about this issue because her ex-husband had three extra-marital affairs using websites similar to the ones run by Global Personals.

Please listen to Susan’s story – it is less than 2 minutes long - but reveals the true cost of websites which encourage people to have affairs:

Listen to Susan’s story here

(Please note: Susan is not her real name and someone else has read the story to protect her family’s confidentiality.)

Please sign the Faithfulness Matters statement now if you want to stand up against companies like Global Personals who run websites which profit from encouraging people to have affairs.

The delegation from Faithfulness Matters met with Global Personals yesterday at their lawyers, Lawson-Cruttenden, to discuss our concerns about the websites they run which encourage and facilitate people to have affairs.  Sadly, the CEO Ross Williams chose not to attend nor send any of his Directors.  Their PR and Marketing Executive, Louisa Page and a communications consultant represented them.

Our perspective
 
From our perspective the meeting went well. We expressed our objectives and shared with them direct testimony of someone who has been personally affected by the kind of websites that they run.  We unpacked our ethical concerns about the promotion and profiting from breaking up relationships.

Global Personals’ response

• Global Personals’ view is that as long as what they were doing was within the law and between consenting adults then they did not see it as an problem. 
• They defended the concept of affairs sites as being ‘more honest’ for people who were looking to be unfaithful.  But they did not offer much of a reply when we asked ‘But not more honest for the partners and children affected?’
• They did admit that the public advertising of affairs websites is at times inappropriate but emphasised that it was not their responsibility – it was an issue for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). 

Global Personals made it clear that they intend to continue to run and profit from running the Marital Affair website.

What we asked of Global Personals

We gave them a statement which commits them to pull out of websites which encourage people to have affairs.  We asked that they arrange a further meeting with us to discuss whether Global Personals would sign it with someone senior enough from their side to make this decision.  We would like this meeting to happen within the coming month and asked them to respond by the end of this week.  We await their response.
 
In the meantime we made clear our campaign would continue.  We emphasised our values but also our commitment to the campaign’s aims.  In many ways things have just begun – we have a clear strategy for how the campaign will roll out over the coming months.

• On Friday we will be posting an audio testimony of someone involved in the campaign whose ex-husband had 3 affairs on these kind of websites which caused devastation to her and her family.  
• Next week we will be emailing everyone about the next action we will be taking in the campaign.

Thanks again for all your great support. Please continue to encourage friends to sign up to the Faithfulness Matters Statement so they can receive the emails and be part of this campaign.

Thanks again for all your great support. 
On behalf of the Faithfulness Matters team

A delegation of six representatives from Faithfulness Matters are meeting with Ross Williams, CEO of Global Personals this coming Monday 5th December in London.  We are hoping for a positive meeting to discuss with Mr Williams our concerns about Global Personals’ operating and profiting from websites which directly encourage people to have affairs. 

You can support us in this meeting in the following ways:

1. Please encourage friends and family to sign up in support of Faithfulness Matters.  There may well be action required next week and we would like as many people signed up as possible
2. If you are a Christian, please remember the Faithfulness Matters’ team in your prayers and encourage others in your church to do the same.  It is a huge encouragement for us to know we are being supported in this way by churches from across the UK and beyond.

We will update everyone early next week about how the meeting went.

Other updates:

• You might be interested in this article on our campaign in IDEA magazine published this week
• The Early Day Motion in support of Faithfulness Matters has had 29 MPs sign it so far.  There have been 14 Labour MPs, 5 DUP, 5 Conservative, 4 Lib Dems and 1 Plaid Cymru. 
• If you have not contacted your MP please contact your MP and ask them to sign the EDM

We are really pleased that Ross Williams, CEO of Global Personals, has agreed to meet with a delegation from Faithfulness Matters on the 5th December.

We really hope that he will be responsive to our calls for a more ethical approach to how his company operate.

The Early Day Motion in Parliament supporting Faithfulness Matters

At the time of writing 23 MPs have signed up to the Early Day Motion in support of Faithfulness Matters.

If you have not done so please contact your MP and urge them to support it.

A Christian response to websites which encourage unfaithfulness

Also you might be interested in this talk that Jon Kuhrt gave on Faithfulness Matters at Christ Church New Malden last week at their evening service.

Global Personals’ complained in their last statement that Faithfulness Matters was ‘an unelected body’. 

With this in mind, we are very encouraged that an Early Day Motion has been tabled in Parliament by six (elected) MPs who are supporting our campaign.

Read the Motion here on the Parliament website

Please contact your MP as soon as possible and ask them to sign this Early Day Motion and add their support to the growing concern about companies who make money from helping to break up relationships.

Also, you might be interested in these articles published in the last couple of days which have featured the Faithfulness Matters campaign:

• Extramarital Affairs and the National Business Awards – New Statesman
• Does Faithfulness Matter? – Theos
• The Commodification of Unfaithfulness – Ekklesia

Global Personals work with a very wide range of companies to help them run their own branded dating websites.  They use a platform they have developed called White Label Dating.

It is a very comprehensive service which makes it as easy as possible for anyone with an concept for a dating website to start one up.  As it says on their website: “WhiteLabelDating.com provides the dating software, membership database, payment processing, customer support, hosting infrastructure, tax processing and much more. You provide your brand, website design and marketing and we do the rest.”  Global Personals clearly have a major role in the websites, which is why they describe themselves as ‘running’ and ‘operating’ the sites in question.

Minimising their role

However when it comes to replying to the concerns that Faithfulness Matters have had about their involvement in websites such as Marital Affair it all sounds very different.  They present themselves as simply providing software and technological support and that they have no responsibility for the content or purpose of the site.

This issue lies at the heart of our concerns about the ethical practices of Global Personals – because we believe they do have a responsibility for who they partner with. 

The importance of truth

It is obviously very important that Faithfulness Matters is accurate in what we say and how we say it.  This is why we have laid an emphasis on our values - we are not bullying or threatening anyone – but we do want the truth is to be disclosed.  Of course, it is Global Personal’s right to engage in whatever business they choose – and it is also our right to comment on their business.

In their own words…

With this in mind, the best place to understand the actual relationship is the Marital Affair website itself.  The following sentences are taken from a very long list of Maritalaffair.co.uk Terms and Conditions on its website:

• The Site is operated by Global Personals Limited, a company registered under the laws of England, whose registered office is Minton Place, Victoria Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1EG (“us”, “we”, “Global Personals”) to deliver a service for adults to meet each other and communicate online (“the Service”)
• All copyright, design rights, database right, patents, and any rights to inventions, know-how, trade and business names, trade secrets and trade marks (whether registered or unregistered) and any applications therefore (“Intellectual Property Rights”) in the Site belong to and vest in Global Personals, or are licensed to Global Personals unless otherwise specified. All such rights of Global Personals are hereby asserted and reserved.
• Contact Information – The Site and the Service is operated by Global Personals Limited, a company registered under the laws of England, whose registered office is Minton Place, Victoria Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1EG.

Elsewhere it also states:

• MaritalAffair.co.uk is run by Global Personals Limited, a UK company specializing in the development of online dating websites for the singles community. For all media enquiries, please email press@globalpersonals.co.uk, who will be able to assist.
• The site is powered by WhiteLabelDating.com, a powerful cross-platform dating solution which can be integrated with other websites.

It shows that Global Personals’ extensive role in the Marital Affair website.  On each page of the site it has the statement ‘This site is owned and marketed by Marital Affair Ltd’ – but no where is there any contact information for Marital Affair.  There is no one who you can contact, no one who can be held accountable for the site - apart from Global Personals. 

Being clear about the issue

We do not have a problem with around 99% of what Global Personals does – in fact they are clearly an innovative and well-run business.  But we firmly believe that their refusal to adopt a more ethical or moral approach  to who they will partner with is wrong.  

It’s our hope and aim that they will choose to close down their partnership with Marital Affair, just as they have done with Affairsdating, and make an ethical decision to no longer operate sites like these.   It’s not only the right decision morally but also, in the long run, for their business.  They should focus on their core work of bringing people together – not breaking them up.

Interesting developments! Global Personals have pulled out of running affairsdating. 

We see this as a positive step but we have written to Global Personals with the following questions:
 
1) Is this part of a strategy to withdraw from running or operating websites which encourage/facilitate affairs?
2) Does Global Personals have plans to withdraw from operating the Marital Affair website?
 
We have not heard back from them yet.  We also await dates for the meeting with them that was offered.

It appears that the ‘brand’ of affairsdating has transferred to the US company Ashley Madison who a large company infamous for running such websites and courting controversy.  Recently they were in the news for using a picture of Boris Johnson on one of their billboards and have sought to develop their business in the UK.

Although it is disappointing that the brand has continued it is clear evidence that our pressure has made a difference. We will have to see what their response is to our questions.

National Business Awards ceremony- Tuesday 8th November

Next Tuesday, it is the ceremony for the National Business Awards at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane in London where Global Personals are shortlisted for 2 of these prestigious awards.  Prime Minister David Cameron have described the awards as an event which celebrates ‘the ‘best of British business’ and Chancellor George Osbourne is due to give the opening speech.

The awards’ judges were made aware that Global Personals’ operate websites such as Marital Affair and we have been told it has been taken into consideration in their scoring. But obviously they could still win. 

Faithfulness Matters does not believe that a company which operates a website such as Marital Affair should be eligible for such government-endorsed recognition.  We would like to know whether George Osbourne agrees with us….

Global Personals, the company which runs both Marital Affair and affairsdating websites, has been shortlisted for two awards at the presigious National Business Awards 2011. They are nominated for the BlackBerry Growth Strategy of the Year and the WorldPay Online Business of the Year.

The awards ceremony is held on November 8th at a lavish event at Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane in London.  George Osbourne, the Chancellor, is giving the welcoming address.

Faithfulness Matters is concerned to know whether the judges for the awards, which pride themselves on rewarding business excellence, innovation and ethics, are aware of some of the websites which Global Personals are involved in.

Global Personals is clearly a well-run business and is innovative, and we have no problem with the conventional dating sites that it runs and which bring people together to find love. However, we do not consider that websites which promote and profit from people cheating on their partners is legitimate business for a responsible company.  We don’t think anyone should make money from helping to break up people’s relationships.

We want to ensure that those involved in judging the awards have the full facts – especially as a key factor in their decision is the ethics of the companies involved.  It could be deeply embarrassing for the National Business Awards if they were to award a prize to a business that was profiting from human misery in this way.

If you want to join Faithfulness Matters and take action alongside many others concerned about these websites then please read our Statement and then email faithfulnessmatters@gmail.com