Items tagged with OkCupid
Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark caused quite the online kerfuffle when they posted personal information of nearly 70,000 users registered at OkCupid, a popular online dating website. The data dump contained usernames, ages, gender, religion, personality traits, and answers to questions designed to help the site find matches for singles. Lead author Emil Kirkegaard and his research partner Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekaer zeroed in on OkCupid "because users often answer hundreds of not thousands of questions," making it a rich and readily available source of survey data. The information obtained is also public, though the authors never sought consent to gather, organize, and post the data...
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People have a tendency to get ticked off if you mess with their heads, especially without their permission. Facebook, the world's largest social network, found this out the hard way when it revealed that it had altered nearly 700,000 user feeds to study people's emotions. Not cool, but are these types of studies necessary in order to build a better online experience? Online dating site OkCupid seems to think so. "OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how...
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