‘-OK Cupid, Match.com, Plenty of Fish and “BIG DATING” companies caught manipulating your mind and your emotions. Time to cancel!

‘-OK Cupid, Match.com, Plenty of Fish and “BIG DATING” companies caught manipulating your mind and your emotions. Time to cancel!

OK Cupid, Match.com, Plenty of Fish & “BIG DATING” companies caught manipulating your mind and your emotions. Time to cancel!

 

Using Dead Soldiers Photos To Sell Dating Subscriptions. Buys hundreds of dead soldier photos at a time . Tipped off by VA Staff. Also using dead prostitute photos.

OkCupid: We treat our users like lab rats and it is “awesome”!

Let’s give OkCupid some credit. The online dating service’s reaction to the uproar over Facebook’s emotional manipulation experiment is about as forthright as one could expect: Basically, we do the same thing all the time, and it’s awesome!

Facebook tinkered with changing the flow of “positive” and “negative” items in a news feed to see if it would change the emotional tone of posts made by the manipulated users. In a blog post published Monday titled “We Experiment on Human Beings!” OkCupid founder Christian Rudder analyzed a series of similar studies undertaken by the dating site.  The third such “experiment,” which Rudder titled “the power of suggestion,” is the most likely to raise  eyebrows.

OkCupid relies on an algorithm to tell its users how much of a “match” they are with other site users.

By all our internal measures, the “match percentage” we calculate for users is very good at predicting relationships. It correlates with message success, conversation length, whether people actually exchange contact information, and so on. But in the back of our minds, there’s always been the possibility: maybe it works just because we tell people it does. Maybe people just like each other because they think they’re supposed to? Like how Jay-Z still sells albums?

So OkCupid starting skewing the data, telling some users that they were a bad match when they were actually compatible, while telling other users that they were compatible when the algorithm determined otherwise.

Guess what? “When we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are. Even when they should be wrong for each other.”

A footnote to Rudder’s article says that users were informed of their “true” match percentages after the experiment. But I’m not sure that absolves OkCupid of any potential wrongdoing. Nor does the “everyone does it” defense:

We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook “experimented” with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.

Rudder and the technologists who have defended Facebook are missing something important. There’s a big different between straightforward A/B testing — presenting two different versions of a site to different groups of users in order to see what works better — and consciously presenting false information or otherwise skewing emotionally laden data. One is completely acceptable tinkering designed to improve usability, while the other is irresponsible behavior that treats human beings like lab rats and their emotions as play toys.

Sure, the line that separates one from another is murky and confusing. But there is a line. Silicon Valley needs to start asking itself the question: How do we think our users would feel if they knew we were feeding them false information? If they don’t understand the natural anger and betrayal that would likely ensue, then maybe they shouldn’t be running websites that are designed to promote human connection.

The scary thing is, when you see a title like “We Experiment on Human Beings!” you start to realize that many of these people don’t even realize that there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed in the first place.
Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.
Follow More Andrew Leonard.

BIG DATA/DATING SITES ARE CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES!:

These companies have been accused of knowingly:

Using Fake Profiles To Sucker Subscribers and create “ClickBait”.

Using Dead Russian Hookers For Profile Pictures.

Mood manipulating users in order to trick them into doing things.

Giving spy agencies open access to all users actions, texts and emails.

Selling user data to data-mining companies.

Stealing photos of models to create fake profiles.

Hiring armies of off-shore contractors to write fake profiles all day.

Selling user information to marketing companies.

Selling user information to political parties.

Exploiting fragile users emotions in order to trick them into buying things.

Acting as a front for Prostitutes and Escorts.

Reading users emails and texts for fun.

Swapping users personal pictures in staff clubs.

Selling users profiles to other dating services without their permission.

And many other unethical and criminal actions…

All users of these services are encouraged to join CLASS ACTION LAWSUITS so that they can be financially compensated for online abuse and manipluation.

Lawyers Involved In Organizing Such Lawsuits Can Be Found at:

More Links …

Match.com denies using “that many” dead Russian Prostitutes for fake profiles. Says- “Almost all of our Russian Prostitutes are very much alive and operating our fake profiles with their actual pictures”.  Says CEO: “I didn’t know my staff were doing crimes”

OK Cupid plans to “Mood Test” Match.com staff to prove they are lying.

All 3 also caught using “photo-comparison and analysis facial recognition software” which FINDS YOU in outside personal and business sites, thus breaking your privacy and anonimity security and exposing you to stalkers, hackers, spies, data-miners, marketing companies and rapists. They even sell your image data to data miners!

 

  1. Dating site OkCupid admits to manipulating user profiles in several …

    4 hours ago … The dating site OkCupid admitted Monday to altering millions of user profiles in a series of experiments, including pairing up seemingly …

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  2. OkCupid Brags About Manipulating Online Daters in Secret Tests …

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  3. OkCupid: We treat our users like lab rats and it is awesome – Salon …

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  4. OkCupid Co-Founder: ‘We Experiment on Human Beings…That’s …

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  5. OkCupid Experimented on Users, Then Blogged About It – Yahoo

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  6. OkCupid Admits Toying With Users to Find Love Formula – NDTV

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  7. OkCupid Brags About Experimenting on Users – NationalJournal.com

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  8. OkCupid admits that it experiments on users, just like Facebook …

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    1. Romance website Match.com sued for $1.5 billion over … – Reuters

      25 Nov 2013 … MIAMI (Reuters) – A Florida woman has filed a $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com, alleging the website …

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    4. Model sues Match.com for $1.5B over fake profiles | New York Post

      22 Nov 2013 … A Florida model on Friday slapped Match.com with a $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit accusing the Internet-dating giant and affiliated websites …

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    5. Match.com – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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      25 Jan 2013 … A Las Vegas woman is suing the online dating service Match.com for $10 million, after pairing her with a man who stabbed her 10 times in the …

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  9. Defending Facebook, OkCupid says it also runs user-behavior tests …

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  11. Dating website sued for ad with dead U.S. soldier – British Columbia …

    28 Feb 2012 … Two dating websites – including Vancouver-based Plenty of Fish – are being sued by the parents of a dead U.S. soldier who say his picture was …

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  12. Another US lawsuit… | Plenty of fish blog

    29 Feb 2012 … We have previously been sued in the US for using decimal numbers and … POF passes 100M weekly messages, 2 Billion Pageviews/Week » …

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  13. Plenty of Fish Sued for Photo of Dead Soldier

    30 Mar 2012 … Plenty of Fish sued for Advertisement Featuring a Dead US Solider. Family says photo was used without permission.

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  14. POF being sued Free Dating, Singles and Personals – Forum

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  15. Vancouver’s dating website PlentyofFish.com sued over photo of …

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  16. Plenty Of Fish: Canadian founder Markus Frind removes ‘intimate …

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  17. B.C. dating website Plenty of Fish is being sued by the … – Dailymotion

    28 Feb 2012 … BC dating website Plenty of Fish is being sued by the parents of a dead US soldier – Dailymotion. home. sign in. settings. categories. Music.

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  18. Dating Websites Sued for Using Dead Soldier’s Photo | NBC 5 …

    27 Feb 2012 … The family of a soldier has sued PlentyofFish.com and True.com over the use in ads of a photo of him that taken days before his death in Iraq in …

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  19. 2 Dating Websites Sued Over Soldier’s Photo In Ads « CBS Dallas …

    27 Feb 2012 … Two dating websites, including one based in Dallas, are being sued for … PlentyOfFish did no online advertising in the United States in …

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