OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction - NYTimes.com: Now Mr. Rudder has written a book, called “Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One’s Looking” (Crown), to be released this Tuesday, in which he argues for wider industry study of people’s online searches, social interactions, clicks, pics, posts and the like. While Google, Facebook and Microsoft already publish this kind of social science research, Mr. Rudder chronicles his own experience at OkCupid with the aim of encouraging smaller companies to do likewise — for the greater public good.
“I realized I could use the data to examine taboos like race by direct introspection,” Mr. Rudder writes, describing how he tapped into aggregated information about OkCupid members to examine online interactions between white men and black women. “The data was sitting right there on our servers. It was an irresistible social opportunity.”
This kind of limitless data-mining is possible because most sites, OkCupid included, have use policies that give them unfettered rights to harness users’ details for research and product improvement.
“The industry has so much data and the data are so accessible, they can do research on anything they want,” says Elizabeth Buchanan, the director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. “But just because we can do this with the data, should we?”
Some companies, concerned about a lack of industrywide research ethics standards, are instituting formal internal review processes to vet their human studies.
“I realized I could use the data to examine taboos like race by direct introspection,” Mr. Rudder writes, describing how he tapped into aggregated information about OkCupid members to examine online interactions between white men and black women. “The data was sitting right there on our servers. It was an irresistible social opportunity.”
This kind of limitless data-mining is possible because most sites, OkCupid included, have use policies that give them unfettered rights to harness users’ details for research and product improvement.
“The industry has so much data and the data are so accessible, they can do research on anything they want,” says Elizabeth Buchanan, the director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. “But just because we can do this with the data, should we?”
Some companies, concerned about a lack of industrywide research ethics standards, are instituting formal internal review processes to vet their human studies.