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FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

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Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#151

Post by trogdor »

miki123211 wrote: post #113
johnnyanmac wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were good 15 years ago. As with all things, it went to shit when Match.com started consolidating everything and the bean counters realized that a quality product was not as profitable. Surprised it took this long to get litigation. So many people complaining about how crap dating sites are, but no one thought to realize the site itself was the problem and fell into the whole "looksmaxxing" grift. Some people rea…

Dating sites are an extremely hard business to be in. On a traditional (social) network, whether that'd be Facebook, the railroad or the Bloomberg Terminal, you have the network effect. The more users you get, the more interesting the network becomes, which means yet more users want to join. This is a positive feedback loop. The entire point of a dating site is to find somebody to leave that site with. Statistically…

> The entire point of a dating site is to find somebody to leave that site with.

Many people on dating apps are not looking for exclusive or long-term relationships.

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#152

Post by lolc »

AntiDyatlov wrote: post #119
lolc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want to see is a dating service where I can pledge some money to some charity. Everybody on the site can check what I've pledged, and I can release it anytime. The service can take their cut, fine. Now when I meet somebody through the service, and we think it's serious, we can release that money. And we can check whether the other did too! Sure there will still be profiles with people that don't pledge, becaus…

How can the service know that the users have really entered into a relationship?

Why would it need to? Users police themselves :-)

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#153

Post by chaps »

crazygringo wrote: post #149
chaps wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 persona…

You realize I was responding to a comment that wasn't about that? A company running NLP on its own user data doesn't have anything to do with third parties.

> 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.

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#154

Post by projektfu »

fortran77 wrote: post #140
projektfu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like a "your mom called" joke.

If it’s a joke, it’s disgusting. If you think it’s a joke, you’re homophobic. If it’s not a joke, it’s a serious trust violation. Either way it’s bad. Considering the downvotes, I’m saddened that Hacker News thinks this is ok behavior from Newsom.

I just think it's hilarious that you took it literally.

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#155

Post by chaps »

smcin wrote: post #146
chaps wrote: post #9

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.

No it totally wasn't a fucked up admission, it was actually a useful and pro-user measure (all this good stuff was before the 2011 acquisition). Christian Rudder's OKTrends blog (and Sam Yagan's presentation at their acquisition celebration) even spelled out the reason why: some women on OKC (or, more rarely, men) would acquire the "Replies rarely"/red color on their profile, for almost never ( Anyway, to avoid getti…

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.

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#156

Post by smcin »

chaps wrote: post #155
smcin wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it totally wasn't a fucked up admission, it was actually a useful and pro-user measure (all this good stuff was before the 2011 acquisition). Christian Rudder's OKTrends blog (and Sam Yagan's presentation at their acquisition celebration) even spelled out the reason why: some women on OKC (or, more rarely, men) would acquire the "Replies rarely"/red color on their profile, for almost never ( Anyway, to avoid getti…

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.

OKC analyzed message traffic in an anonymized way to infer when matching was/wasn't working, and what insights that revealed about people's inferred vs stated preferences.

As such it wasn't "reading other people's messages". That's according to the OKC founders description of what they did, pre-acquisition. Since they were reasonably upfront about what they did, and since that functionality worked even for free users and they didn't aggressively push premium or gate the features, I believe they were being truthful. Furthermore, after the 2011 acquisition and when they stopped being active on OKC itself, there was a palpable degradation in site quality. (And post-2014, IAC went on to sell personal information about users' substance use etc. to insurers, to which users had never given informed consent).

So I think your date explained things badly and you picked up the wrong end of the stick. It's trivially easy to write a script that strips usernames and identifying information. And it's not too hard to distinguish "Hey baby" or "DTF?" from more meaningful messages. For the platform to do that with an intent to improving matches was strongly positive, not negative.

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#157

Post by chaps »

smcin wrote: post #156
chaps wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OKC analyzed message traffic in an anonymized way to infer when matching was/wasn't working, and what insights that revealed about people's inferred vs stated preferences. As such it wasn't "reading other people's messages". That's according to the OKC founders description of what they did, pre-acquisition. Since they were reasonably upfront about what they did, and since that functionality worked even for free users…

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.

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#158

Post by selimthegrim »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #145
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing singles near you!

Killing significant others to broaden the dating pool! Delivering value to existing users!

This is clearly the follow up to the dril tweet - you do not, in fact, have to hand it to them for figuring out how to monetize the enemy combatant guidelines

Re: FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data

#160

Post by IAmBroom »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #31
junkaccount100 wrote: post #7

Throwaway account. I tried these sites a couple of times each in the past (the UK versions at least). I'm married now and fortunately don't have to deal with "the dating scene" and how awful it is/was. When I signed up for Match, about ten minutes into the process my account suddenly changed to that of another man including different photo, descriptions, orientation etc. I don't know why this happened but it was abso…

I met my current wife on OKC in 2010, before online dating became an utter cesspool. I've been out of the dating scene for 16 years now, but based on what I see on social media, I think online dating sucks today for three reasons. 1. Many men (Not all, but many) are there simply because they want to get laid. They're not looking for a relationship, they're looking for a hook-up, and they're not honest about their int…

You admit you haven't been in the dating scene for almost a generation. You then go on to generalize about supposedly significant portions of both sexes, based on your observations of "social media".
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