Emil Kirkegaard found himself surrounded by a controversy after he published personal data of more than 70,000 OKCupid users. The Danish researcher leaked the names, locations, ages and sexual preferences of these users who tend to trust the dating site rather blindly.
Seeing the public outcry and anger, Kirkegaard took no time to remove all the OKCupid data that he leaked on May 8. However, his action, by no means, signify that people who hook on to dating websites are safe from such intrusion into privacy at any point of time in their future.
The data was pulled off on May 13, Friday, after OKCupid came forward to state that Kirkegaard had violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in addition to the dating site's terms of usage. The company said that it is exploring what legal actions it could take against Kirkegaard at this point of time.
On its website, OKCupid claims to use a math algorithm to find suitable dates. It asks the user certain questions to figure out their compatibility with a suitable partner. All of the information that a user provides is restricted to the site only and can only be viewed by fellow OKCupid user.
A team of master's students from Aarhus University went on the dating site to collect data on the users. The team included Kirkegaard and two of his associates.
"OKCupid contains thousands of user-generated questions used for matching persons. Since these answers are public, they can be gathered automatically," Kirkegaard stated on his blog post.
The reseacher claims "scraping" the data from the dating site since 2014 and possesses a database of almost 70,000 users, including their demographic information and the answers that they gave to around 2,000 personal questions. He described the data as "currently unpublished."
Kirgegaard and his associates deployed an automated software to collect data from the profiles of OKCupid data users. The trio posted the collected data in a paper published on the Open Science Network, which is a repository of data shared by the researchers around the world.
However, the data were soon removed as soon as the controversy surrounding the data leak stirred up. The OKCupid data leak has threatened the privacy of the rest of the community of dating site users.
The following video explains the math behind OKCupid actually works: