[gtremper]

A little off-topic, but I don't see why OKCupid's actions here are unethical. Their matching algorithm isn't perfect, so they shouldn't treat it as an oracle of truth. How else would they discover false negatives in their algorithm? Especially since, in this case, a false negative is worse than a false positive (not meeting someone you'll like vs having one unsuccessful date).

[saidajigumi]

> How else would they discover false negatives in their algorithm?

This is exactly why research that deals with humans at Universities invariably must pass a human subjects review process. "How else would we discover X?" is certainly not reason to subject anyone to an unethical experiment. Subjecting people to what you likely believe to be a bad date should very definitely raise red flags, even if the details in practice would pass a human subjects review.

And that's the trouble: there's a tremendous space of research that just isn't ethical to carry out on actual living humans. As such, we have to find methods to determine answers to those questions that don't breach ethical standards. The burdens of discovery must lie squarely on the researchers, not on the (often unwitting) experimental subjects.

[tempestn]

Do you think that giving someone an artificially inflated OKCupid match really rises to the standard of an unethical experiment though? OKCupid doesn't tell you who to go on a date with; they just suggest potentially good matches. (Right? I'm married and don't tend to troll dating sites, but that's my understanding.) You're free to read their profile, exchange messages, etc., before arranging a date. If it is indeed a bad match, then most likely you would realize your incompatibility early in the process.

[meowface]

People need to at least understand what's being done and they need to give consent before it happens. Otherwise, you're literally toying with people's lives. And in this case it's not in some insignificant way: you're manipulating their romantic and sexual endeavors.

It's actually far, far more invasive than what Uber did as they described it in the blog post.

[001sky]

Have you read the terms and conditions of your latest bank account? The level of forced-consent to thrid party disclosure may alarm you.

[meowface]

That's a completely different category of life violation though. Imagine instead that your bank was lying to you about your account balance, modifying it to be plus or minus 3% of the actual balance. Without your consent or knowledge. All to conduct a "psychology/market experiment".

Then it would be equivalent.

[001sky]

Nothing in this post involved distortion of customer data. They just linked up transcation time/date and geo-location data. Then did some simple math. It's not out of the question that your payment processor could replicate this analysis...Once your credit card processor cuts a deal to geo-tag your purchase history. Of course almost all fixed POS hardware is geomapped, and the mobile stuff is trackavle, so that's not much of a stretch.

[EpicEng]

Don't they sell people on their super-accurate-awesomesauce-state-of-the-art matching algorithm? Were people warned that they may be guinea pigs?

[aroman]

It was unethical because they didn't warn their users ahead of time that they might randomly be opted into the alternate pairing system.