I was really avoiding making this topic because I don't even know where to start but here goes. As someone who has done research in the past and is now doing research as a master's student, this is an ethical nightmare. At the same time, I wanted to grab the popcorn and watch it unfold. Honestly, this excited me way more than it should have. This is my version of juicy gossip these days and that is sad.
Without further ado...
I'll start off with a little intro from this blog post (which is actually a pretty good read so I would check it out if you want to read up more on this)
There is an excellent Tim Minchin song called If You Open Your Mind Too Much, Your Brain Will Fall Out. I'm sad to report that the same is also true of your data and your science.At this point in the story I'd like to introduce you to Emil Kirkegaard, a self-described "polymath" at the University of Aarhus who has neatly managed to tie every single way to be irresponsible and unethical in academic publishing into a single research project. This is going to be a bit long, so here's a TL;DR: linguistics grad student with no identifiable background in sociology or social computing doxes 70,000 people so he can switch from publishing pseudoscientific racism to publishing pseudoscientific homophobia in the vanity journal that he runs.Yeah, it's just as bad as it sounds.
So here's the facts:
- Danish "researchers" (if you can call them that) published a dataset containing information on 70,000 OKCupid users.
- Information included things such as usernames, age, gender, sexual orientation, the kind of relationship the person is looking for and basically any question they may have answered on the website.
What is the problem with this, you ask?
Well... they ignored any fucking ethical guideline put into place by:
a) Not getting permission from OKCupid to take this information, at the very least.
b) Not getting informed consent from the people whose information they were taking.
c) Not anonymising any of this information so that the people included in it could not be identified.
The blogger I mentioned above summarised this quite nicely:
Having now spent some time exploring the data, and reading both public statements on the work and the associated paper: this is without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases I have ever seen.There are two reasons for that. The first is very simple; Kirkegaard never asked anyone. He didn't ask OKCupid, he didn't ask the users covered by the dataset - he simply said 'this is public so people should expect it's going to be released'.This is bunkum. A fundamental underpinning of ethical and principled research - which is not just an ideal but a requirement in many nations and in many fields - is informed consent. The people you are studying or using as a source should know that you are doing so and why you are doing so.
The blogger then goes on to tear Kirkegaard a new one, which is quite entertaining. Really, worth the read.
Can this get worse?
Yes. Why? Because Kirkegaard literally doesn't give a shit.
But as of now, he's removed the data so at least there's that (even if it has already been downloaded hundreds if not thousands of times)
What's worse is that the paper itself is an actual joke but whatever. Juicy research gossip that I am enjoying way too much.
Read up more here: