Blind dates are not too smart these days. Anyone who would want to date from the internet must be missing about half their brains.
Well, that kind of equal and opposite extreme is just as silly as your first response that we should just ~trust~. I met my husband on the internet, right here on Free Republic, incidently.
People are potentially a lot safer meeting and getting to know someone in the relative safety of internet, than they are meeting someone in the same town who knows where you live and can follow you there. But, either way you meet someone new, it's not unwise or unethical to do a little checking up to see if he's who he says he is.