Is the internet now just one big human experiment? | Dan Gillmor

It's not only Facebook treating us like lab rats. Dating sites can manipulate our emotions, too – and blame it on user testing. The possibilities are endlessly scary

If you thought the internet industry was chastened by the public firestorm after Facebook revealed it had manipulated the news feeds of its own users to affect their emotions, think again: OKCupid.com, the dating site, is now bragging that it deliberately arranged matches between people whom its algorithms determined were not compatible – just to get data on how well the site was working.

In a Monday blog post entitled – I’m not making this up – “We Experiment On Human Beings!” the site’s co-founder, Christian Rudder, essentially told us to face the facts of our modern world ... at least as he sees them:

[G]uess 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.

To test this, we took pairs of bad matches (actual 30% match) and told them they were exceptionally good for each other (displaying a 90% match.)

To me, this resignation to online corporate power is a troubling attitude because these large corporations (and governments and political campaigns) now have new tools and stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams. These tools are new, this power is new and evolving.