After a data set of almost 70,000 users from the online dating site OkCupid was released online by a group of researchers, experts are now questioning online privacy issues.
The online publication Wired reports that on May 8, a group of Danish researchers released publicly on a website a data set of around 70,000 users of OkCupid, an online dating site. The released data include usernames, gender, age, location, personality traits, what kind of relationship (or sex) they are interested in and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site.
Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was the lead on the work, was asked whether the researchers tried to anonymize the data set. He replied on Twitter that the data set was already public; therefore, they did not attempt to anonymize it.
The same mindset is also found in the study's accompanying draft paper posted to the online peer-review forums of an open-access online journal. There, Kirkegaard argued that all the data set was already publically available. Releasing it merely presents it in a more useful form even if "some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data."
Despite Kirkegaard's position, there are many people concerned about research ethics, online privacy and the practice of releasing publicly large data sets. One of the most important concerns that is often the least understood, is the fact that even if a person knowingly shares a single piece of information, big data analysis can amplify and publicize it in a different way the person agreed or intended.
In order to collect the data in the study, the researchers affiliated with Aarhus University in Denmark, Emil Kirkegaard, Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær and Oliver Nordbjerg used a browser extension dubbed "scraper," designed to collect data from web pages. An OkCupid spokesman declared that the research team was breaking the OkCupid's terms of usage and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, since they collected the data without the dating website's permission. According to The Christian Science Monitor, the research team has also breached the ethics of Social Science Research.
