OP's position is extreme, and I feel like any negative publicity to Facebook or OkCupid over this is going to ultimately have the effect of punishing them for s

OP's position is extreme, and I feel like any negative publicity to Facebook or OkCupid over this is going to ultimately have the effect of punishing them for saying that they ran these experiments. Changing the way content is ranked by your private service is not in the same ethical territory as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. It's just not. That said, there is an interesting discussion here, which is: where is the line? Netflix runs an experiment (and whether it chooses to collect data) every time it changes its ranking algorithm, but I think we'd agree that it's ethically OK in that case. What about those sleazy mobile game companies that use data science and heavy experimentation to find and target "whales" who have an in-app-purchase addiction problem? Not ethically OK. I don't know where the line is, but it's clear to me that some tech companies are on one side and some are on the other.