The outrage against Facebook’s experiment was almost universal. The act of experimenting on people without their knowledge or consent, goes against long-standing, established ethical guidelines.

Tim Carmody recently wrote more about how Facebook also betrayed the trust of those posting updates. People trusted that the news they shared would get to the intended audience, their friends. While a problem, that doesn’t actual trigger my ethical concerns because Facebook betrayed my trust years ago. I already know that if I post something that there will be people I want to have see it that will not. The fact that my posts may have been used to experiment on my friends upsets me, but the initial ethical breach is so outrageous that it is minor in comparison.

Then Tim started talking about OKCupid and he makes some good points. Problem is that he, like many others, lets his residual Facebook outrage take over. As a result, he over thinks the issue.

There were two experiments outlined that really played with people’s interactions with each other. A third experiment was simply playing with their rating system and not really a problem.

[Edit: The 3rd experiment did have them hide all of a subscriber’s profile text to see if the text influenced the ratings. It was not universally done. Troublesome but not on the level of the ones below. The written story was either all or nothing.]

The first was that they hid the profile photos for everyone for 7 hours. This was universal. OKCupid turned off a feature in a “Love is Blind” stunt. It was not random profile information. It was an obvious feature that they removed. As a user, I may have been annoyed, but no other information was hidden. The greatest risk was to OKCupid as people could be annoyed enough to quit.

The second experiment was simply horrific. They lied to their subscribers. They made recommendations and displayed incorrect compatibility ratings. It doesn’t matter how accurate the rating system is or is not. To the best of their knowledge, OKCupid lied.

LIED.

That is a problem. Period. How can anyone trust the information presented to them ever again from OKCupid. What will they lie about next?

OKCupid lied. There is no need for any in-depth analysis. What they did was wrong. Period.

If you want to get upset, think about how this reinforces the bigger issue of the lack of ethics in the tech world.

What else has been done to people that we don’t know about?