Atlanta Among Safest Cities For Online Dating, Study Says

ATLANTA, GA — If you're thinking about swiping right or clicking "like" to set up your next date, Atlanta is a pretty good place to do it.

The city was ranked among the safest in the nation for online dating in a recent study, finishing 9th.

SafeWise and HighSpeedInternet.com compiled the list of 55 cities to see where they rank in terms of how safe they are for online dating. Researchers from both groups teamed up to overlay and analyze the most recent FBI violent crime and cyber crime data along with state-by-state STD rates from the Centers for Disease Control in the reckoning.

"The correlations led us to draw interesting conclusions about the dangers of online dating in certain geographic areas and cities," researchers wrote.

SafeWise is a home security company and HighSpeedInternet.com helps consumers choose an Internet provider.

With a population of 463,878, Atlanta had 580 sexually transmitted diseases per 100,000 people and 1,202 violent crimes per 100,00 people, according to the researchers' data.

See the entire list here.

In its early stages, online dating was viewed as a last resort for the romantically desperate, researchers noted. Yet as people's lives became more integrated with the Internet, dating websites and apps shook that stigma in making such interactions part of the mainstream, researchers added.

But online dating still has inherent risks attached to it that are often overlooked given the widened acceptance of online dating, researchers said. While caution should be exercised when meeting someone for the first time or even in chatting with someone new online, singles in some cities should be more cautious than others, researchers noted.

The researchers analyzed a year’s worth of sexually transmitted disease and violent crime data, then adjusted it for population to determine a safety score. These scores tell you the cities where you should feel safe meeting people and those where you may want to use extra caution.

Under the researchers' scoring system, Atlanta landed in 9th with an 8.2. The No. 1 city on the list, San Antonio, scored a 9.4, followed by New York City (9.2), Portland (9), San Jose (8.9) and Oklahoma City (8.7).

The bottom five cities on the list were Detroit, Orlando, Knoxville, Riverside, Calif., and, coming in last, Buffalo, NY with a measly 0.8.

Patch's Tony Cantu contributed to this report.

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