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Some creepy Danish assholes went ahead and released a full dataset on 70.000 random users of the OkCupid dating service "because data science".
After being confronted about the questionable ethics of this stunt, lead researcher Emil O. W. Kirkegaard refuses interviews, stating that the data was already public. Kirkegaard also implies that opponents of his methods are "social justice warriors", an oftentimes euphemistic term for people interested in things like gender and minority rights issues. Interestingly, this term is repeated and specified as an area explicitly excluded from Kirkegaard's interest in "civil liberties" on his personal website.
In addition to "civil liberties", the personal website of this "26 year old polymath wannabe" (read: fuckwit neckbeard) lists interests such as online privacy and the Pirate Party. That's right, you can't make this shit up: http://emilkirkegaard.dk
These people simply don't care that the "public" information posted on a dating site may cost certain people their jobs, families or even their lives, at any point in the future. Open source intelligence like this may be used to extort people at a later date or lower the threshold for invisible discrimination everywhere from the job market to insurance claims.
Perhaps all this seems irrelevant to Kirkegaard, as his self-defined interest in liberty explicitly excludes those most vulnerable to such structures.
The rest of us could do worse than to remember what is going on and question how informed our consent really is: By default, everything you do on the mainstream internet is recorded. Private browser modes don't really help to protect you and neither do VPNs. Practically everything you typically do leaks information that can be connected back to you. For a demo, see https://panopticlick.eff.org.
And oh, dating sites don't exclude sharing your dating related personal info with interested third parties ( https://www.abine.com/blog/2012/privacy-on-okcupid/ ). But hey, you probably don't live with one foot in the closet concerning any aspect of your life you may have hinted at in a dating profile or its chat service. Right?
This time, professional stalkers in imaginary data science lab coats just happened to unmask a bunch of information. The wilful cluelessness apparent in this case is even worse than in the decade-old case there AOL released a bunch of poorly anonymised data on search habits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak
Normally, interested parties would have to pay a bunch of money for datasets from data brokers or ad/analytics companies and perform a varying degree of computation to unmask and correlate some of the personally identifiable from different sources. That sounds like work, but it's of course increasingly possible to automate.
So, take a step back and realize that the only thing protecting you from an existence in something way worse than the oversight of Stasi, the KGB or Securitate, is the thin veil of aging and increasingly inefficient legal protections we happen to have in many western democracies.
Parties interested in exploring the utter and complete exploitation of your most intimate information sometimes do so with a holier-than-thou aura of privacy mindedness and selective personal liberty politics. All while personally getting their filthy little hands ever dirtier when the power is at their fingertips.
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