Hmmm...while the information is public, I'd have least liked to be asked if it was okay to use

I'm not sure if my profile and information made it into the dataset, but I agree that there are ethical considerations and rules that were violated in taking this sort of (even public) information through data scraping and publishing it without informed consent, a concept drilled into the lowest-ranks of researchers, as one of the basic tenets of post-Nuremburg Code research.

Researchers Publish Data Set of 70,000 OKCupid Users

"Yesterday morning I woke up to a Twitter friend pointing me to a release of OKCupid data, by Kirkegaard. Having now spent some time exploring the data, and reading both public statements on the work and the associated paper: this is without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases I have ever seen," wrote Oliver Keyes, a research analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation, in a blog post.

"A fundamental underpinning of ethical and principled research - which is not just an ideal but a requirement in many nations and in many fields - is informed consent. The people you are studying or using as a source should know that you are doing so and why you are doing so," he added later.

It is also, of course, a reminder to users that we put a lot of our private information out on such sites (including this one, I agree I probably overshare), and that we should consider whether we'd like that information to be out there before posting.