What's sad is that he could be in a lot less trouble if he had at the very least anonymised the data so that users were not easily identifiable. Unfortunately, I don't think he really cared. The right to privacy doesn't just disappear because people are on certain social media networks - especially when it comes to research.
This is the conclusion I came to by the time I read about half the comments on here and read the article when I saw you post it yesterday (obvi. not on codex lol)
He isn't the first to do something like this. He won't be the last.
But he is wildly unethical and down right disrespectful of the fact that every single one of those users has a life, well being and mind of their own.
Different people have different understandings of how the internet or just life in general work. People don't always know that what they're positing isn't secure or safe. Often times people don't understand that everything they do is not encrypted or that nothing is really hack-proof.
It's not like these people were on Ashley Madison looking to break their marital vows (maybe some were.) These for the most part were people just trying to find love. This guy went on there and abused how easily you can access peoples private info.
Imagine if this were Mark Zuckerberg (sp?) and he exploited a ton of person info and stats from facebook without anonymizing it.... he would be torn apart.
They post/share/publish stats about facebook plenty. They share how many members they have, how many people actively use FB/Whatsapp/Instagram all those sorts of things.
On top of all of this, he didn't even have really positive intention. Which also bugs me.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should :|
