Author: Michael Zimmer
Publisher: Wired
Publication Year: 2016
Summary: The following article describes how a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 OkCupid users, including usernames, age, gender, location, the type of relationship (or sex) they are looking for, personality traits, and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site. Emil, the project’s lead, stated unequivocally that the “data is already public.” The sentiment “Public Does Not Equal Consent” is used to argue against it in this article. The OkCupid data release serves as a reminder that the ethical, research, and regulatory communities must collaborate to reach a consensus and minimize harm. We must address the conceptual stumbling blocks in big data research. The inherent ethical quandaries in these projects must be reframed.