OK Cupid Users Doxed in the Name of Science!

[HuckleB]

http://skepchick.org/2016/05/ok-cupid-users-doxed-in-the-name-of-science/

"...

If you used OK Cupid between November 2014 and March 2015, congratulations! You may have been the unwitting subject of an open-access psychology study, by which I mean all your personal information may have just been released to the public, including your demographic data and sexual turn-ons, all attached to your username. (Find if your username was affected here.)

70,000 OKCupid users were doxxed this week by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, a Danish linguistics grad student who likes to pretend he’s a working psychologist of some kind by publishing his own “journal” which mostly features his own “research.” Being the editor of your own made-up journal is handy because you don’t have to bother with things like peer review and ethical guidelines.

Usually I’m all for freedom of information, but you may have guessed that I’m not too thrilled about this data dump. That’s because Kirkegaard didn’t bother to anonymize the data. So it’s not just that now the entire world knows that someone out there is a 48-year old white gay guy who lives in Sheboygan and likes to be spanked and occasionally smokes pot, but they also know that his username is danielpguggenheim68, which may make it EVEN EASIER to figure out who he is. Note that I just made all that up — I’m not going to help the spread of the info.

But I don’t really need to, because the data has already been downloaded hundreds of times. So even if Kirkegaard goes back and anonymizes the data, the toothpaste is already out of the tube. He’s just doxxed 70,000 people, and possibly committed crimes in several different countries.

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WOW!