Facebook, OKCupid research raises new ethical questions in use of 'big data'

Patrick Smith

IS 353 BLOG 2

            The article Facebook, OKCupid research raises new ethical questions in use of ‘big data’, is about how the dating service, OKCupid, manipulated their users to study their behavior. The company revealed their data to the public and they were not happy that people were being manipulated. OKCupid was analyzing people’s emotional language.

              The first part that I want to point out in this article is the 689,000 users that were shown the posts that contained emotional language. OKCupid started a new innovation that monitored people’s reactions and emotions without the peoples consent. These huge numbers of people were being experimented on and did not even know. Another thing I want to point out is the algorithm the company used to mess up the dating site. They changed the code so that when a match was good then it read as a bad rating and bad ratings as a good match. The reason the company wanted to do this is because when people see that the ratings are good then the people think no matter what they are perfect for each other. The last thing I want to point out is all of the ethical problems come up since data is getting bigger and bigger everyday. After Facebook was created privacy became a huge problem and lawyers have been working closely with them. The privacy issue is a very big deal here and you cannot experiment on people without their consent.

            After reading this article I feel like they should of added more about what the people’s reactions were when they heard about the experiments. Also I think the article could of added more on what OKCupid is going to do in the future to improve and hopefully nothing like this will happen again. Finally Facebook is a billion dollar company and they worked with OKCupid. I think Facebook should of known better to make sure people consented first.