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It's unlikely that I'll convince someone who feels a "lesson needs to be painful," but here goes. This is all about what tools enable. This issue is criticall

It's unlikely that I'll convince someone who feels a "lesson needs to be painful," but here goes. This is all about what tools enable. This issue is critically important to people who have a much higher privacy need than the average person. Consider an abusive ex tracking down their victim in an unknown new city. If the profile is indexable, the abuser is trying to either use OKCupid's search (which returns results with a high degree of randomness), or using things like "site:okcupid.com $interest1 $interest2", which is noisy, to say the least. This task looks hopeless quickly. But if someone provides a database of profiles, the job gets much more tractable. Suddenly, you've enabled the attacker to filter by people who have 1,2,n interests of their ex, search with photographs of their ex, hell, even use facial recognition. Some of these things were kind of possible before, but with a database they are likely. If someone builds a "find your ex" web frontend on this database that uses facial recognition technology, it becomes accessible to everyone, and maybe even popular. Saying that this lesson should be educational is theoretically nice, but doesn't match how users interact with products in the real world. Anyone who has worked on a product with millions of users knows that the average user (a) doesn't know that there are settings (b) they don't know which things are controlled by settings (c) they don't know how to find the settings, and (d) they don't know how to change them. This is so common that I no longer believe that users are responsible for the implications of default settings (and OKCupid's defaults are, inconveniently enough, Public). Tools usually are capable of both good and bad things, but a database of profiles has limited upside, and a huge downside. Like, this thing had better be curing a minor fatal disease for the amount of trouble that it will cause.

meshko 10y ago
So i read your response and everything you say reinforces my feeling that it is better to publish this than not to. At least this was done not for profit. If the data is collected and the data is for sale (and it is, because i understand it was purchased legally), there _will_ be someone who builds the service for aggregation and searching like you describe. And it might be very expensive, but that crazy ex will pay that $1000 to find the person she is after. In other words, saying "it's unethical to make access to public info easy" is useless; if information is public, someone will access it and someone will make it easy to access. It's better if this is done in a public way and for free, than if someone sells it quietly.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  The problem still comes down to your "lessons should be painful" approach, and how disproportionate it is relative to the perceived error here. To take an analogy: if a child plays with matches, you teach the child not to do that, explain how fire is dangerous, etc. You don't light a fire and hold the child's face down on it to burn them and make the lesson "painful". Yet when it comes to deliberately making sensitive/intimate data about people public that basically is what you're advocating for: the potential emotional harm that can be done to the people involved is off the charts.
  - meshko 10y ago
    Frankly I don't understand what are these terrible secrets that people are comfortable sharing on a public web site for everyone to see, but not comfortable with everyone seeing them. I just fail to see the pain. Discomfort, sure, but pain and suffering?

meshko 10y ago

So i read your response and everything you say reinforces my feeling that it is better to publish this than not to. At least this was done not for profit. If the data is collected and the data is for sale (and it is, because i understand it was purchased legally), there _will_ be someone who builds the service for aggregation and searching like you describe. And it might be very expensive, but that crazy ex will pay that $1000 to find the person she is after. In other words, saying "it's unethical to make access to public info easy" is useless; if information is public, someone will access it and someone will make it easy to access. It's better if this is done in a public way and for free, than if someone sells it quietly.

ubernostrum 10y ago
The problem still comes down to your "lessons should be painful" approach, and how disproportionate it is relative to the perceived error here. To take an analogy: if a child plays with matches, you teach the child not to do that, explain how fire is dangerous, etc. You don't light a fire and hold the child's face down on it to burn them and make the lesson "painful". Yet when it comes to deliberately making sensitive/intimate data about people public that basically is what you're advocating for: the potential emotional harm that can be done to the people involved is off the charts.
- meshko 10y ago
  Frankly I don't understand what are these terrible secrets that people are comfortable sharing on a public web site for everyone to see, but not comfortable with everyone seeing them. I just fail to see the pain. Discomfort, sure, but pain and suffering?