Why OKCupid sending users on bad dates was a good idea

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/07/why-okcupid-sending-users-on-bad-dates-was-a-good-idea/

Why OKCupid sending users on bad dates was a good idea
By The Conversation
Thursday, August 7, 2014 11:38 EDT
By Nick Dalton, The Open University

Online daters continue to express outrage about the revelation that OkCupid has been experimenting on users by telling them they matched well with people they had nothing in common with to see if they still got on anyway. Many feel they have been treated like lab rats. OKCupid remains utterly unapologetic.

It would be nice to think that the dating site is the exception to the rule and that companies don’t generally cross the line of decency by experimenting on their users. But nothing could be further from the truth. Most websites you use will try out some kind of experiment on you at one time or another.

These days it’s pretty rare to go to a big website and not be tracked somehow, even if it’s a charity. If you download a browser plug-in such as Ghostery you can watch websites as they watch you.

Lab rat culture

Ever since Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup, tech firms have been wise to the value of carrying out a type of user experimentation called A/B testing. It’s at the core of many business plans in Silicon Valley and in tech clusters around the world.


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I've been using Ghostery since it came out and I'm very pleased with it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/?src=cb-dl-mostpopular