chaps

You're missing my point again.

My privacy problem exists with third parties AND internally within OkCupid. At some point, running NLP over messages necessitates that an analyst or ops person actually has to look at the underlying data at some point.

The 3rd party stuff just exudes something like a privacy "code smell" -- "orthogonality" doesn't really matter to my point because 1. these things don't exist in a vacuum and 2. stench has a way of permeating through layers, regardless of how orthogonal underwear is.

Like, do you trust that OKCupid staff didn't download user messages to their laptops?

We're talking past each other. You think the ends justify the means and I don't. Like, if there's a "Read" marker for a person viewing my messages, then I should have the same for analysts reading my messages, too. Like, when someone is running grep over everyone's messages, they're not just viewing that in isolation -- the context is what's important, and that requires actually reading the messages and their outcomes.

> For the platform to do that with an intent to improving matches was strongly positive, not negative.

Do you realize how much work that OkCupid has put into their product to make matching intentionally worse (through analysis!)? Take off your rose-tinted glasses!!

Edit: aaaand there's a new article about OkCupid giving facial recognition data to 3rd parties.

Hey, my point is that it's fucked up that I went on a date with someone who admitted their job was to read other people's messages. If you don't think that's fucked up, then we simply have a difference in opinion. I don't know what the rest of your post is about.

> I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale

I'm confused why "as long as" carries so much weight here considering the article that started this discussion. You seem to trust that they stopped their privacy fuckups with third parties. I don't know where your trust comes from.

You realize that you're responding in a thread about OkCupid deceiving users and sharing data with 3rd parties right?

  34. In response to this request, Humor Rainbow gave the Data Recipient access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos. Humor Rainbow’s President and Chief Technology Officer were directly involved in facilitating the data transfer.

  35. In addition to user photos, Humor Rainbow shared other personal data with the Data Recipient, including each user’s demographic and location information.

You're funny.

I think the "only thing" that would make me cherry-pickable from their data is that I used an autoclicker to give everyone a 5 star... I have mixed feelings about doing that, but I got a couple (surprisingly nice) dates out of it that never went anywhere.

I once went on a date with someone who did research at OKCupid who told me that they were doing NLP-style analysis of peoples' messages that they sent to each other. Still not really sure what to think of the date itself, but it was a fucked up admission.

How much has Microsoft paid you to sell your soul?

Like I said in a different post, there are legal reasons for why you would want the original data. Deleting the data from the dataset is negligent.

If you want something to blame, blame the system that allowed the data to be bad in the first place. You're pointing your finger at the wrong people and it's unreasonable of you to call them negligent.

When I say "raw", what I'm referring to is the preservation of the data's chain of custody. If I'm looking at the data with an intent to sue the respective government agency, then I have strong legal reasons to make sure that the data isn't modified. If I start from open data for example, the gov agency will have their data person sign an affidavit making this very clear and I will lose my case basically immediately.

  The issue imo is that a person closer to the point the data was collected or merged is probably better equipped with understanding of what may be wrong with it

You'd think so, but just like most other systems, systems are often inherited or not thought out, so the understanding is external and we can't assume expertise within.

Sure we should indeed expect that they do that. But look at enough data and you'll learn that those expectations are a path towards never-ending frustration. I've been there, spending >100 hours cleaning data... that never got published because I was too damn focused on the dozens of years of errors that many, many people created.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we should accept messy data. Just, reality is messy and it's naive to think we can catch and remove all of reality's messiness -- which includes the bureaucratic slop that led to the data being published in the first place.

In fact, the government agencies will argue that they have zero legal obligation to clean the data, let alone figure anything about the data, and that they're just giving you the data as-is. This happened to me on a FOIA call where I was trying to get data from the county state's attorney. They insisted they could only run a specific report and that they had no obligation to run any query, meaning I can't even get access to the data I need.

Clean vs not clean data is the wrong fight.

"What does it mean to clean the data?"

This isn't possible to answer generally, but I'm sure you know that.

Look -- I've been in nonstop litigation for data through FOIA for the past ten years. During litigation I can definitely push back on messy data and I have, but if I were to do that on every little "obviously wrong" point, then my litigation will get thrown out for me being a twat of a litigant.

Again, I'd rather have the data and publish it with known gotchas.

Here's an example: https://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-sou...

Should I have told the Department of Finance to fuck off with their messy data? No -- even if I want to. Instead, we learn to work with its awfulness and advocate for cleaner data. Which is exactly what happened here -- once me and others started publishing stuff about tickets data and more journalists got involved, the data became cleaner over time.

"obviously wrong" is a never ending rabbit hole and you'll never, ever be satisfied because there will always be something "obviously wrong" with the data.

Messy data is a signal. You're wrong to omit signal.

Exactly. This is a big problem with "open data". A lot goes into cleaning it up to make it publishable, which often includes removing data so that the public "doesn't get confused". Now I have to spend months and months fighting FOIA fights to get the original raw, messy data because someone , somewhere had opinions on what "clean data" is. I'll pass -- give me the raw, messy data.

What...?

Friend, it's truly great that you can do that. But you're missing the damn point.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, yeah stop publishing garbage data, but as a FOIA nerd... I'll take the data in any state it is. I'm not personally going to be able to clean the data before I receive it. Does that mean I shouldn't release the unsanitized (public) data knowing that it has garbage data within? Hell no. Instead, we should learn and cultivate techniques to work with shit data. Should I attempt to clean it? Sure. But it becomes a liability problem very, very quickly.

Friend, $3B is unfathomable wealth for an individual.

It took me a long time, too. Caution's the game. Collect as many hearts as you can in the beginning and as much gold. Perk shuffling is important, especially early on so you'll want to afford it.

My first win was with Luminous drill + ping pong = https://www.reddit.com/r/noita/comments/goas0k/reminder_ping...

If anyone's interested in this sort of puzzle, the game Noita is filled with them. A large chunk of the code's in lua and you can inspect it!

The final puzzle for the game is a cryptographic puzzle that's been unsolved for five years now. Folk have done just about everything imaginable to solve the puzzle.

Once worked with a systems architect who intentionally disorganized their flow diagrams by just moving nodes in their flow to random places (hi Dan!). The only reason I can think of why he'd do that is to maintain job security by keeping the junior apps folk confused.

If you think "justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed", then please consider the people who aren't famous and can't get media attention when this sort of thing happens to them. Justice and freedom of expression fail to prevail on the regular and this is just one win amongst many, many, many losses.

This.... absolutely already happens. It's trivial and cheap to purchase the three meter, three second resolution data of millions of vehicles.

Yeah, I took that to mean to refresh the game and so I did.... and then lost my progress :(. I really want to play the rest but I don't want to go through the rest of the levels.

Free stuff has a way of short circuiting things.

....yes, half a million dollars per year is highly paid.

I'm one of those weirdos who opts out of the scanners because I'd rather avoid having people casually look inside of my body.

Last time I flew out of Laguardia I opted out and while I was being patted down another TSA agent about twenty feet away kept making kissy faces at me. Very much felt like intimidation.

What a time..

"Apps that already need location data are probably the most likely sources of collecting such data"

Yes, and many companies have access to both feeds.....

There definitely is and I've definitely pitched it to places. The Intercept had interest but told me that they wanted me to build the story out more to be less focused on Chicago. I understand where they were coming from (and the others who said the same thing) but it wasn't possible for me to continue doing freelance work, so no stories ended up being published about it at all.