May 8, a team of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of almost 70,000 users associated with on the web dating internet site OkCupid, including usernames, age, sex, location, what sort of relationship (or intercourse) they’re thinking about, character characteristics, and responses to numerous of profiling questions utilized by your website.
Whenever asked perhaps the researchers attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, whom ended up being lead from the work, responded bluntly: “No. Information is already general public.” This belief is repeated within the draft that is accompanying, “The OKCupid dataset: a tremendously big general public dataset of dating internet site users,” posted to your online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal additionally run by Kirkegaard:
Some may object towards the ethics of gathering and releasing this information
Nonetheless, all of the data based in the dataset are or had been currently publicly available, therefore releasing this dataset just presents it in an even more form that is useful.