7 ms·

The OKCupid data release fiasco

61 points by miraj 10y ago

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
I don't see how site scraping is a "data release".
- fredophile 10y ago
  Because a lot of this information was previously only available to logged in users of a particular service. Would you be okay with someone placing recording devices under the tables of restaurants and then putting the recordings and transcriptions online? Any conversations they pick up happened in a public place where anyone could have overheard them.
  - meshko 10y ago
    Another bad analogy. 1) In public places I usually speak at the volume level at which others can't hear me; if I start yelling in a public place I should expect things that I yell to appear on youtube, in the local newspaper, in the police log 2) I come to the restaurant to eat. If after eating I fill out a survey which includes lots of personal possibly identifying questions, would I have the right to be surprised if next day I find my answers on the website of the restaurant? Have I read the fine print on that survey?
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      How do you feel about sites which build "shadow profiles"?
      - meshko 10y ago
        I dislike them as I dislike all human activity which doesn't produce useful good or services; probably more so as these are probably harmful and parasitic. But I'm not sure how this is related to the subject at hand.
        ubernostrum 10y ago
        Just pointing out that there are more ways to get data about you into a service than you giving that service the data. Would you still accept it as a "painful lesson" if it happened to you?
    - fredophile 10y ago
      Let me explain the analogy to you. In both scenarios you're in a public place communicating information to an intended audience. There is a good chance that some people outside of your intended audience will also get this information. You're accepting the risk that your coworkers may be on the site/at the next table and receive this information but if they aren't then they shouldn't have access to it. In your first point you mention adjusting volume to restrict communication to your desired audience. OKCupid has privacy settings. Users adjusting their privacy settings would be analogous with adjusting volume in the restaurant. The people collecting data in this story created a fake account and used it to bypass the privacy settings. For your second point, it would be more like if you filled out a restaurant survey and saw your answers on an unrelated website like Reddit the next day.
- flogic 10y ago
  Because the data went from something you have to dig around and scrounge to find to a downloadable database. And that is a very big distinction when it comes to who will seek it out and why.
meshko 10y ago
OK can someone ELI5 what is the fallacy of the "it's already public so it's ok" argument? I definitely understand that legal != ethical; but i suspect this is not clear cut at all in this case. I think it is similar to the responsible disclosure vs immediate disclosure. Sure, people get hurt by this and it is real and is a problem, but on the other hand could the educational benefits outweigh that impact? People need to learn that they are being watched and understand how stuff works, and m.b. that lesson needs to be painful. Is it perhaps better if the data is just accessible to everyone and everyone knows about it then if it is only accessible to the highest bidder and you don't even know about it.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  One useful thing to note is that a gigantic amount of information is publicly accessible, but in one or more of the following states: * Requires effort to access * Is in out-of-the-way places many people don't know about * Is in a form that's difficult to consume Even though it's "public", in many ways it behaves as if it isn't, since until one of those conditions is removed people don't really bother to access it, pay attention to it, or try to consume it. In other words, it's one of those "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it" situations. So information which is only available to someone with an account, but on a system which grants accounts for free to anyone who wants one, typically is thus seen as "private" or at least in a "not really public" state until such time as someone massively aggregates it and makes it available to people without accounts, as happened with OKCupid.
  - meshko 10y ago
    The real problem here is that a) OKCupid doesn't have reasonable default settings and opts people in by default to have their information available for sale b) that they don't sufficiently deidentify information they sell. People who release the information are leveling the playing field. I don't think this can be called unethical _easily_.
    - fredophile 10y ago
reustle 10y ago
IIRC, this data was all simply scraped from profiles, not socially engineered out of people. While it might be morally grey, you need to half expect stuff like this will happen when you post it. If you don't want things like your sexual preferences to be public, then don't put them on a free public dating website profile.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  If you didn't want the bank to let someone else have all your money, you shouldn't have put your money in a publicly-accessible bank anyone could visit. And you certainly shouldn't have trusted the bank's promises that it would impose rules on who can access money and how.
  - meshko 10y ago
    Terrible analogy. You are putting your money into the bank in order for the bank to preserve the money and perhaps pay you interest on it. When you use a website like OKCupid, you are getting a service from them in exchange for ability to mine a sell personal information about yourself. And, amazingly, this will lead to... people getting your personal information. The lack of public understanding of this is precisely what makes a dump like this ethically gray. Sure, it's bad that people's information leaked, but at least it wasn't for profit and overall public is better off because more people understand how data works.
- swang 10y ago
  no you are incorrect about this. there is data that is only available if you are a member of the site and answer questions on the site. for example if a question asks you, "would you date a smoker?" if you answer you can post it so other members can see what you answered to gauge whether what you picked matches with what they liked. what this guy did was go through all the questions and answer them at random then scraped the data that was available only to actual members of the site. as for profiles being "public". they can be "public" in the sense that you can go to a url and see their profile, yes. but most people set it so only people who have signed up can see them. so by doing this he most likely violated the TOS of the site and scraped the data without permission. edit: it is not as though it was public, the guy who scraped the data made effort to log into an account, answer all the questions and then _scrape_ the data. it's not like that data is plainly visible if you go to someone's profile.
chrismcb 10y ago
Is it time to think ethics education? Maybe we just to spend a little more time and effort on ethics in education. The author is right, just because it is legal, doesn't mean it is ethical. That is why we have ethics. As far as data being public, I would claim it has to do with expectations of privacy. Phone numbers in the white pages are public and really accessible. Relating that information doesn't change anything. On the other hand the license plate of the car parks in the parking lot is also public information, in the sense that anyone can go down there and record it. But the owner has a certain expectation of privacy. Plus that data isn't really accessible (will before license plate cameras) so releasing that info changes is accessibility. The issues with big data aren't really new. People have to consider that the data they have involves real people.
- meshko 10y ago
  No, people don't need to understand anything about "data they have", because it is not people that have data, it is corporations, and they don't "understand" things, they make profit. What people need to understand is that they are data and that data is a product that can be used against them.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    Corporations are people. And I mean that not in the legal sense, but in that they are made up of people. Real people that make real decisions, both ethical an unethical, about real people, not "data".
yk 10y ago
I think there are two important points, first that there is no longer a clear distinction between public and private spaces. To pick the immediate example, I am currently sitting in my bedroom, but on the other hand I am writing in a public forum. Plus there are conceptually less clear examples, for example chat rooms which are basically public, but I still have the expectation that everybody present belongs to a small community. The other important point is, that there is a shift to questions instead of answers. Technology moves just too fast to give good guidelines in terms of rules. It would perhaps help to define a questionnaire that researches have to fill out, just to demonstrate that they thought about the question. For example, the question "Which groups are especially vulnerable to a leak of the data?" may prompt filtering of said groups and prevent some damage. (That obviously does not help against black hats, but would probably helped in the current OKCupid case.) And lastly I think that there is a mismatch what "reasonable expectation of privacy" means, most people do not have any idea what "big data" means, they believe that Facebook reviews flagged comments, but do not understand that they can (and I would guess do) analyze each and every interaction with Facebook. (I don't mean to single out FB, it is just they are the most obvious example due to their size and the sort of private nature of the network.)
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Sorry, but neither point is convincing to me. First, I don't get why sitting in one's bedroom and writing in a public forum illustrate the clear distinction between public and private spaces. You already noted the forum is public. IT IS PUBLIC. If you put up your web page on the Internet and only search engine would ever come to your page, well, your page is still the public domain. Being in a small community, take a cult, well, if you show up in the public and doing your activity in the public, I would expect that to be a public demonstration. In fact, if you try to run naked with your cult in the middle of the street, you are going to get arrested and charged for public misconduct. If you are running naked in a cult house, well, that's private. The distinction is very clear in these examples. I am not arguing there aren't examples that would illustrate a blur, but your example is too weak. My response to the second suggestion. Well, leak of data is a big deal. So if my research somehow harms people with AIDS, am I allowed to collect the non-AID patients? Another way to put it, filtering doesn't do any good and provides no meaning. From an ethic standpoint, people aren't concerned about what groups will be harmed from the outcome of the research - because the whole point of research is to either validate or invalidate some hypothesis. Research ethic should be about the treatment of data and the process of conducting experiment. However, I do agree that some users aren't aware of what online service do with their application.
dvhh 10y ago
I understand the issue there, but if it has been done by researchers. Hasn't this been done/ will be done by some entity with more defined agenda. It was certainly unethical for the researcher to release the data, but the public really really really need to be educated about putting information on a publicly available and searchable database.
jh021093 10y ago
It makes sense that people are upset that this data is collected and released in this manner - yes it is public but serving it via the API (Not allowing a user to scrape) lets its access remain under the control of the service(and user, to some extent). It seems, though, that this discussion is overlooking the fact that there are companies out there which are gathering this exact same data(And then some) to sell to other organizations who want to identify their users.
minimaxir 10y ago
I wrote and posted a statistical analysis of the OKCupid dataset, but took it down immediately once the information about how the data was obtained came to light. The problem here is that the data included in the release (answers to questions) can only be accessed by logged-in users, and the scraper they used utilizes a login, in which case the researchers blatantly violated the ToS and a DMCA takedown of the dataset was a valid response by OKC. However, almost everything else in an OKC profile, including username, city, and sexual orientation, is public to logged out users by default. (see this analysis of mass-scraped OKC data: http://yakamo.org/?p=112 http://yakamo.org/?p=112). That makes things a grayer area than usual, and serves as a reminder that nothing online is private.
- us0r 10y ago
  > http://yakamo.org/?p=112 http://yakamo.org/?p=112 "I setup 7 servers with mpi4py and it took 48 hours to scrape 3.2million profiles. Now i was ready to get the answer and find out how many profiles where public." I think that works out to around 20 requests/sec. At a certain point it becomes borderline DoS?
  - meshko 10y ago
    At the point where you are negatively affecting their servers availability and doing so with a malicious intent.
  - curiousgal 10y ago
    20 requests per second per 7 servers so it comes out to 3 requests per second. Not even close to a DoS attack.
    - anilgulecha 10y ago
      It's 20 rps -- not sure why you divided by 7. A DoS attack is measured by total, not per server.
      - curiousgal 10y ago
tuna-piano 10y ago
I did some work for an organization, who, after the Ashley Madison leak, downloaded the entire leak and searched through it to find out if any of their employees were in the dump. I wondered, wasn't the data still technically private data that was just stolen and released? And wouldn't it be against the law to then download a copy of that data yourself? But it was actually the legal department that downloaded the dump, so I didn't have much to say.
- vacri 10y ago
  A variant of this is the massive disclaimer on corporate emails, that 'binds' you to ridiculous levels of action if you receive an errant mail from them. Of course, it's not enforceable, as it's a one-sided contract - if you never agreed to anything, then they can't (morally, and usually legally as I understand it) force your hand. (IANAL) Someone explained this to me by saying "If my email signature said 'by receiving this email, you agree to pay me $5', would that be considered a legal contract?"
  - meshko 10y ago
    Yes. (By reading this comment you agree to pay me $100.)
- mistermann 10y ago
  I'd actually love to hear from someone that knows the law on this.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - meshko 10y ago
    I think journalists are constantly publishing information obtained through illegal means and it is legal. http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/08/is_it_illegal_to_download_the.html http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/08/is_it_illegal_to_do...
syewpo 10y ago
I don't understand the problem. It should be fucking apparent by now that no site on the internet can / will / wants to protect your identity. That's on you. Anyone accessing websites with their names, emails attached to their names, emails attached to their phone numbers attached to their names, birthdays in their handles, handles that aren't random strings, identifying passwords, avatars in use on other accounts, images also hosted on flickr, g+, insta, etc. should take it for fucking granted that there is now zero reasonable expectance of privacy. We had the chance for the internet to be a beautiful, anonymous playground, but a few too many people showed up dead on the chan and now the crybabies with body image issues have managed to make all of the above borderline required in the name of stopping "cyber-bullying" and "terrorism." (try to sign up for an account, say a meetup account -- requires an email. Burn emails are blocked for "spam." So you need a gmail. Gmail requires phone number. SIM requires passport identification in europe... > meetup.com requires passport identification... a few alternatives still exist, mail.com for example doesn't require phone verification... yet. Facebook requires an actual scan of the passport if you put in estimably fake information.) And with that thought paradigm, that your ID is a requirement of internetting, comes stupid people getting butthurt by shit like this "oh, but I put forward all this identifying information with the expectation that I would be anonymous, oh, oh, oh". All this because some bitch on youtube can't handle the fact that obesity is not in fact a disease, and because something that kills less people than accidentally suffocating in bed has become an excuse to usher in the police states of america. There was a better way, where this this would never happen. But we as a people opted to go this new direction. Wear a fucking jacket if it's cold and remember _you_ wanted to vacation on the baltic beaches in march, not me.
- gohrt 10y ago
  Please don't post like this on HN.

61 points by miraj 10y ago

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

I don't see how site scraping is a "data release".

fredophile 10y ago
Because a lot of this information was previously only available to logged in users of a particular service. Would you be okay with someone placing recording devices under the tables of restaurants and then putting the recordings and transcriptions online? Any conversations they pick up happened in a public place where anyone could have overheard them.
- meshko 10y ago
  Another bad analogy. 1) In public places I usually speak at the volume level at which others can't hear me; if I start yelling in a public place I should expect things that I yell to appear on youtube, in the local newspaper, in the police log 2) I come to the restaurant to eat. If after eating I fill out a survey which includes lots of personal possibly identifying questions, would I have the right to be surprised if next day I find my answers on the website of the restaurant? Have I read the fine print on that survey?
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    How do you feel about sites which build "shadow profiles"?
    - meshko 10y ago
      I dislike them as I dislike all human activity which doesn't produce useful good or services; probably more so as these are probably harmful and parasitic. But I'm not sure how this is related to the subject at hand.
      - ubernostrum 10y ago
        Just pointing out that there are more ways to get data about you into a service than you giving that service the data. Would you still accept it as a "painful lesson" if it happened to you?
  - fredophile 10y ago
    Let me explain the analogy to you. In both scenarios you're in a public place communicating information to an intended audience. There is a good chance that some people outside of your intended audience will also get this information. You're accepting the risk that your coworkers may be on the site/at the next table and receive this information but if they aren't then they shouldn't have access to it. In your first point you mention adjusting volume to restrict communication to your desired audience. OKCupid has privacy settings. Users adjusting their privacy settings would be analogous with adjusting volume in the restaurant. The people collecting data in this story created a fake account and used it to bypass the privacy settings. For your second point, it would be more like if you filled out a restaurant survey and saw your answers on an unrelated website like Reddit the next day.
flogic 10y ago
Because the data went from something you have to dig around and scrounge to find to a downloadable database. And that is a very big distinction when it comes to who will seek it out and why.

meshko 10y ago

OK can someone ELI5 what is the fallacy of the "it's already public so it's ok" argument? I definitely understand that legal != ethical; but i suspect this is not clear cut at all in this case. I think it is similar to the responsible disclosure vs immediate disclosure. Sure, people get hurt by this and it is real and is a problem, but on the other hand could the educational benefits outweigh that impact? People need to learn that they are being watched and understand how stuff works, and m.b. that lesson needs to be painful. Is it perhaps better if the data is just accessible to everyone and everyone knows about it then if it is only accessible to the highest bidder and you don't even know about it.

ubernostrum 10y ago
One useful thing to note is that a gigantic amount of information is publicly accessible, but in one or more of the following states: * Requires effort to access * Is in out-of-the-way places many people don't know about * Is in a form that's difficult to consume Even though it's "public", in many ways it behaves as if it isn't, since until one of those conditions is removed people don't really bother to access it, pay attention to it, or try to consume it. In other words, it's one of those "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it" situations. So information which is only available to someone with an account, but on a system which grants accounts for free to anyone who wants one, typically is thus seen as "private" or at least in a "not really public" state until such time as someone massively aggregates it and makes it available to people without accounts, as happened with OKCupid.
- meshko 10y ago
  The real problem here is that a) OKCupid doesn't have reasonable default settings and opts people in by default to have their information available for sale b) that they don't sufficiently deidentify information they sell. People who release the information are leveling the playing field. I don't think this can be called unethical _easily_.
  - fredophile 10y ago

reustle 10y ago

IIRC, this data was all simply scraped from profiles, not socially engineered out of people. While it might be morally grey, you need to half expect stuff like this will happen when you post it. If you don't want things like your sexual preferences to be public, then don't put them on a free public dating website profile.

ubernostrum 10y ago
If you didn't want the bank to let someone else have all your money, you shouldn't have put your money in a publicly-accessible bank anyone could visit. And you certainly shouldn't have trusted the bank's promises that it would impose rules on who can access money and how.
- meshko 10y ago
  Terrible analogy. You are putting your money into the bank in order for the bank to preserve the money and perhaps pay you interest on it. When you use a website like OKCupid, you are getting a service from them in exchange for ability to mine a sell personal information about yourself. And, amazingly, this will lead to... people getting your personal information. The lack of public understanding of this is precisely what makes a dump like this ethically gray. Sure, it's bad that people's information leaked, but at least it wasn't for profit and overall public is better off because more people understand how data works.
swang 10y ago
no you are incorrect about this. there is data that is only available if you are a member of the site and answer questions on the site. for example if a question asks you, "would you date a smoker?" if you answer you can post it so other members can see what you answered to gauge whether what you picked matches with what they liked. what this guy did was go through all the questions and answer them at random then scraped the data that was available only to actual members of the site. as for profiles being "public". they can be "public" in the sense that you can go to a url and see their profile, yes. but most people set it so only people who have signed up can see them. so by doing this he most likely violated the TOS of the site and scraped the data without permission. edit: it is not as though it was public, the guy who scraped the data made effort to log into an account, answer all the questions and then _scrape_ the data. it's not like that data is plainly visible if you go to someone's profile.

chrismcb 10y ago

Is it time to think ethics education? Maybe we just to spend a little more time and effort on ethics in education. The author is right, just because it is legal, doesn't mean it is ethical. That is why we have ethics. As far as data being public, I would claim it has to do with expectations of privacy. Phone numbers in the white pages are public and really accessible. Relating that information doesn't change anything. On the other hand the license plate of the car parks in the parking lot is also public information, in the sense that anyone can go down there and record it. But the owner has a certain expectation of privacy. Plus that data isn't really accessible (will before license plate cameras) so releasing that info changes is accessibility. The issues with big data aren't really new. People have to consider that the data they have involves real people.

meshko 10y ago
No, people don't need to understand anything about "data they have", because it is not people that have data, it is corporations, and they don't "understand" things, they make profit. What people need to understand is that they are data and that data is a product that can be used against them.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  Corporations are people. And I mean that not in the legal sense, but in that they are made up of people. Real people that make real decisions, both ethical an unethical, about real people, not "data".

yk 10y ago

I think there are two important points, first that there is no longer a clear distinction between public and private spaces. To pick the immediate example, I am currently sitting in my bedroom, but on the other hand I am writing in a public forum. Plus there are conceptually less clear examples, for example chat rooms which are basically public, but I still have the expectation that everybody present belongs to a small community. The other important point is, that there is a shift to questions instead of answers. Technology moves just too fast to give good guidelines in terms of rules. It would perhaps help to define a questionnaire that researches have to fill out, just to demonstrate that they thought about the question. For example, the question "Which groups are especially vulnerable to a leak of the data?" may prompt filtering of said groups and prevent some damage. (That obviously does not help against black hats, but would probably helped in the current OKCupid case.) And lastly I think that there is a mismatch what "reasonable expectation of privacy" means, most people do not have any idea what "big data" means, they believe that Facebook reviews flagged comments, but do not understand that they can (and I would guess do) analyze each and every interaction with Facebook. (I don't mean to single out FB, it is just they are the most obvious example due to their size and the sort of private nature of the network.)

yeukhon 10y ago
Sorry, but neither point is convincing to me. First, I don't get why sitting in one's bedroom and writing in a public forum illustrate the clear distinction between public and private spaces. You already noted the forum is public. IT IS PUBLIC. If you put up your web page on the Internet and only search engine would ever come to your page, well, your page is still the public domain. Being in a small community, take a cult, well, if you show up in the public and doing your activity in the public, I would expect that to be a public demonstration. In fact, if you try to run naked with your cult in the middle of the street, you are going to get arrested and charged for public misconduct. If you are running naked in a cult house, well, that's private. The distinction is very clear in these examples. I am not arguing there aren't examples that would illustrate a blur, but your example is too weak. My response to the second suggestion. Well, leak of data is a big deal. So if my research somehow harms people with AIDS, am I allowed to collect the non-AID patients? Another way to put it, filtering doesn't do any good and provides no meaning. From an ethic standpoint, people aren't concerned about what groups will be harmed from the outcome of the research - because the whole point of research is to either validate or invalidate some hypothesis. Research ethic should be about the treatment of data and the process of conducting experiment. However, I do agree that some users aren't aware of what online service do with their application.

dvhh 10y ago

I understand the issue there, but if it has been done by researchers. Hasn't this been done/ will be done by some entity with more defined agenda. It was certainly unethical for the researcher to release the data, but the public really really really need to be educated about putting information on a publicly available and searchable database.

jh021093 10y ago

It makes sense that people are upset that this data is collected and released in this manner - yes it is public but serving it via the API (Not allowing a user to scrape) lets its access remain under the control of the service(and user, to some extent). It seems, though, that this discussion is overlooking the fact that there are companies out there which are gathering this exact same data(And then some) to sell to other organizations who want to identify their users.

minimaxir 10y ago

I wrote and posted a statistical analysis of the OKCupid dataset, but took it down immediately once the information about how the data was obtained came to light. The problem here is that the data included in the release (answers to questions) can only be accessed by logged-in users, and the scraper they used utilizes a login, in which case the researchers blatantly violated the ToS and a DMCA takedown of the dataset was a valid response by OKC. However, almost everything else in an OKC profile, including username, city, and sexual orientation, is public to logged out users by default. (see this analysis of mass-scraped OKC data: http://yakamo.org/?p=112 http://yakamo.org/?p=112). That makes things a grayer area than usual, and serves as a reminder that nothing online is private.

us0r 10y ago
> http://yakamo.org/?p=112 http://yakamo.org/?p=112 "I setup 7 servers with mpi4py and it took 48 hours to scrape 3.2million profiles. Now i was ready to get the answer and find out how many profiles where public." I think that works out to around 20 requests/sec. At a certain point it becomes borderline DoS?
- meshko 10y ago
  At the point where you are negatively affecting their servers availability and doing so with a malicious intent.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  20 requests per second per 7 servers so it comes out to 3 requests per second. Not even close to a DoS attack.
  - anilgulecha 10y ago
    It's 20 rps -- not sure why you divided by 7. A DoS attack is measured by total, not per server.
    - curiousgal 10y ago

tuna-piano 10y ago

I did some work for an organization, who, after the Ashley Madison leak, downloaded the entire leak and searched through it to find out if any of their employees were in the dump. I wondered, wasn't the data still technically private data that was just stolen and released? And wouldn't it be against the law to then download a copy of that data yourself? But it was actually the legal department that downloaded the dump, so I didn't have much to say.

vacri 10y ago
A variant of this is the massive disclaimer on corporate emails, that 'binds' you to ridiculous levels of action if you receive an errant mail from them. Of course, it's not enforceable, as it's a one-sided contract - if you never agreed to anything, then they can't (morally, and usually legally as I understand it) force your hand. (IANAL) Someone explained this to me by saying "If my email signature said 'by receiving this email, you agree to pay me $5', would that be considered a legal contract?"
- meshko 10y ago
  Yes. (By reading this comment you agree to pay me $100.)
mistermann 10y ago
I'd actually love to hear from someone that knows the law on this.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- meshko 10y ago
  I think journalists are constantly publishing information obtained through illegal means and it is legal. http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/08/is_it_illegal_to_download_the.html http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/08/is_it_illegal_to_do...

syewpo 10y ago

I don't understand the problem. It should be fucking apparent by now that no site on the internet can / will / wants to protect your identity. That's on you. Anyone accessing websites with their names, emails attached to their names, emails attached to their phone numbers attached to their names, birthdays in their handles, handles that aren't random strings, identifying passwords, avatars in use on other accounts, images also hosted on flickr, g+, insta, etc. should take it for fucking granted that there is now zero reasonable expectance of privacy. We had the chance for the internet to be a beautiful, anonymous playground, but a few too many people showed up dead on the chan and now the crybabies with body image issues have managed to make all of the above borderline required in the name of stopping "cyber-bullying" and "terrorism." (try to sign up for an account, say a meetup account -- requires an email. Burn emails are blocked for "spam." So you need a gmail. Gmail requires phone number. SIM requires passport identification in europe... > meetup.com requires passport identification... a few alternatives still exist, mail.com for example doesn't require phone verification... yet. Facebook requires an actual scan of the passport if you put in estimably fake information.) And with that thought paradigm, that your ID is a requirement of internetting, comes stupid people getting butthurt by shit like this "oh, but I put forward all this identifying information with the expectation that I would be anonymous, oh, oh, oh". All this because some bitch on youtube can't handle the fact that obesity is not in fact a disease, and because something that kills less people than accidentally suffocating in bed has become an excuse to usher in the police states of america. There was a better way, where this this would never happen. But we as a people opted to go this new direction. Wear a fucking jacket if it's cold and remember _you_ wanted to vacation on the baltic beaches in march, not me.

gohrt 10y ago
Please don't post like this on HN.