Yesterday, OkCupid proudly announced that it, like Facebook and all other companies on the Web, regularly experiments on human beings. Co-founder Christian Rudder who heads up OkCupid's data analytics revealed three experiments the site had run on its love-seeking lab rats. One of them involved deceiving users about how compatible they were in order to see if there were sparks between people OKCupid's algorithms deemed a poor match, and sparks between people destined for each other who were told they weren't. In a remake of Romeo and Juliet, it'll be an AI trying to keep the lovers apart instead of warring families. OkCupid has far more goodwill from users than Facebook, but experimenting on its users still rubbed some people the wrong way.
Algorithms make crucial decisions everyday, companies experiment without telling people, and public is uninformed. This. Needs. Attention.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) July 28, 2014
More corporate experiments: "We reversed the behavior of the steering wheel on a random sample of our cars & measured how drivers reacted."
— matt blaze (@mattblaze) July 28, 2014
Beneath the tech-dude humour, ('we experiment on you - LOL!') lies the veiled ultimatum ('we own the platform - put up with it or leave').
— Kate Crawford (@katecrawford) July 29, 2014
Christian Rudder provided some more details via email about the experiment -- which displayed purposefully deceptive "match percentages" to users. He says it involved fewer than 1,000 users and that it "was very short." Unlike the infamous Facebook emotion manipulation study, users were told afterwards that their match percentage had been screwed with. This is the message the company sent the affected users several days after the "test" was concluded:
Dear [nameA]
Because of a diagnostic test, your match percentage with [nameB] was misstated as [%]. It is actually [%]. We wanted to let you know!
Best,
OkCupid
"Because 'experiment' has become such an emotionally loaded word, we used the more neutral phrase 'diagnostic test,' which we felt had the same meaning," said Rudder by email. It is telling that OkCupid felt it right to reveal a test had happened, unlike Facebook's approach. To make the message even more candid, it could have said "purposefully misstated."
There were a mix of responses to the OkCupid revelation on the OkTrends blog, including many people upset about the idea of being part of experiments. One commenter wanted to know if the site exempts paying users from "diagnostic tests." "I decided to give money to this company because I appreciated that it provided a free dating service while other sites charge through the nose for inadequate services," wrote John. "I have the right as a paying customer, however, not to be given erroneous information about my matches."
OkCupid has not said if only the freebies are guinea pigs. Other users were more forgiving. "Users of hook up sites, most of whom lie regularly in their postings, upset because the site is being deceitful?" wrote Gwailo. "Hilarious."
