Okcupid dating
Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA’s math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods. While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox. McKinlay, a lanky year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match.
The whole purpose of this blog is to analyze OkCupid’s data, and without a little However, most online dating sites are used by guys trying to get their rocks off.
When asked whether the researchers attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. Data is already public. Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data. However, all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it in a more useful form.
The most important, and often least understood, concern is that even if someone knowingly shares a single piece of information, big data analysis can publicize and amplify it in a way the person never intended or agreed. Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a privacy and Internet ethics scholar. In each of these cases, researchers hoped to advance our understanding of a phenomenon by making publicly available large datasets of user information they considered already in the public domain.
Many of the basic requirements of research ethics—protecting the privacy of subjects, obtaining informed consent, maintaining the confidentiality of any data collected, minimizing harm—are not sufficiently addressed in this scenario. Since OkCupid users have the option to restrict the visibility of their profiles to logged-in users only, it is likely the researchers collected—and subsequently released—profiles that were intended to not be publicly viewable.
The final methodology used to access the data is not fully explained in the article, and the question of whether the researchers respected the privacy intentions of 70, people who used OkCupid remains unanswered. I contacted Kirkegaard with a set of questions to clarify the methods used to gather this dataset, since internet research ethics is my area of study.