She canceled the date after her match went AWOL. Two days later, the alarm bells went off when she got a calendar invite on her work email
Dating someone you’ve never met comes with a certain level of trust, but that trust can disappear quickly when a stranger starts finding personal information you never gave them. Ecologist and environmentalist Jessika McFarland, who goes by @jessforplanet on Threads, shared her experience in a post on July 20, 2026, after a dating-app match disappeared when they were supposed to make plans. But an invite in her work email two days later made her question everything.
In the Threads post, McFarland shared that she had matched with a man online, and they loosely planned to meet the following week. When he still hadn't picked a time by the afternoon of the date, she assumed the plans were off. Two days later, though, she received a calendar invitation at her work email from someone using his first name. The invite was titled “Strada,” the name of a local café. That was when she realized that the guy on the dating app had somehow tracked down her full legal name and department at the large university where she works, all to ask her out.
McFarland said finding this out left her feeling extremely unsafe, especially because they had never actually met. However, she later confronted the man, and according to her, he was apologetic and seemed to understand why his actions had crossed a line. She also mentioned that he had not intentionally meant to frighten her, but the incident highlighted a broader difference in how men and women can experience dating and unwanted attention. The fact that he chose to track down her otherwise private details instead of messaging her on the app was what scared her and made her raise concerns.
McFarland's experience is part of a broader concern that researchers have found around dating apps and unwanted contact. A recent study of 848 dating-app users found that 27.24% had experienced dating-app-facilitated cyberstalking in the previous year. The researchers found that information shared on dating profiles can sometimes make it easier for someone to find additional details about a person elsewhere online, while linked social accounts can give unwanted contacts another way to reach someone outside the dating app.
The post drew plenty of reactions from other Threads users. @notoddone advised, “Never give a stranger your personal information like where you work or anything related to it.” @celebrating797 wrote, “He's lucky; I'd have reported him directly to his company's HR.” Meanwhile, @adouglassme asked, “I will never understand how anyone thinks this is going to win someone over.”
For more of her content, you can follow @jessforplanet on Threads.