OkCupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-Data Science

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May 8, a small grouping of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of almost 70,000 users for the on the web dating internet site OkCupid, including usernames, age, sex, location, what type of relationship (or intercourse) they’re enthusiastic about, character faculties, and responses to huge number of profiling questions utilized by the website.

Whenever asked perhaps the scientists attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate pupil Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, whom ended up being lead regarding the ongoing work, responded bluntly: “No. Information is currently general general general public.” This belief is duplicated within the accompanying draft paper, “The OKCupid dataset: a really big general general public dataset of dating website users,” posted into the online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal additionally run by Kirkegaard:

Some may object into the ethics of gathering and releasing this information. Nevertheless, all of the data based in the dataset are or had been currently publicly available, therefore releasing this dataset simply presents it in an even more form that is useful.

This logic of “but the data is already public” is an all-too-familiar refrain used to gloss over thorny ethical concerns for those concerned about privacy, research ethics, and the growing practice of publicly releasing large data sets.