Resource Pages

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Scientific consent, data, and doubling down on the internet

Oliver Keyes
Originally published May 12, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The Data

Yesterday morning I woke up to a Twitter friend pointing me to a release of OKCupid data, by Kirkegaard. Having now spent some time exploring the data, and reading both public statements on the work and the associated paper: this is without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases I have ever seen.

There are two reasons for that. The first is very simple; Kirkegaard never asked anyone. He didn't ask OKCupid, he didn't ask the users covered by the dataset - he simply said 'this is public so people should expect it's going to be released'.

The blog post is here.