OKCupid Brags That It Experiments on Humans, Too

If you look for dates online, you’re the guinea pig for all kinds of experiments run by snarky Internet types, who grind up your loneliness and use it to feed their algorithms. Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OKCupid, proudly admitted as much on Monday in a post on the company’s blog entitled: “We Experiment on Human Beings!“
OKCupid’s admission wouldn’t have come if people hadn’t gotten so angry about Facebook’s (FB) decision to tinker with users’ newsfeeds and publish the results in an academic journal.
The Facebook backlash came because they were conducting experiments on people’s emotions without the subjects’ permission. By that standard, OKCupid’s experiments were much worse. After all, dating is all about feelings. In one test, the company wanted to see if its matching algorithms—the way that it predicts whether people will like one another—worked. So it told people who it thought wouldn’t like each other that it thought they would like each other. So, you know, OKCupid performed the equivalent of setting people up on bad dates and then watching them from across the restaurant, giggling.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-28/okcupid-brags-that-it-experiments-on-humans-too#r=lr-sr