Is the internet now just one big human experiment?

[RKP5637]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/29/internet-human-experiment-facebook-dating-sites?CMP=ema_565

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.

Human experimentation is definitely part of how websites work, in a way, because all online services of considerable size do something called A/B testing – seeing how users respond to tweaks, then adjusting accordingly. But that doesn't mean sites can, do or should routinely and deliberately deceive their users or customers.

[Newsjock]

1. Ethics education is seriously lacking in this country

The same amoral, no-ethics types who flocked to Wall Street in the go-getting '80s have flocked to Silicon Valley in the 21st century, and they are bringing the same type of destructive hypercapitalism, this time tinged with a helping of superiority-drenched neolibertarianism that proclaims they are better than everyone else, especially "the poors."

[TlalocW]

2. Hmmmm... interesting

*Writes down some cryptic notes from behind the safety of a two-way mirror*

TlalocW

[Xithras]

3. A/B Testing has always been part of large-scale app development.

Get the application "perfect", deliberately break it for a small subset of users, and measure the efficacy delta between the groups. If everything is working properly, there should be a huge difference between the two. If not, your application sucks and needs to be re-engineered.

We have a guy here at work who's entire job is built around efficacy and usability testing. He gets paid six figures to work out interesting ways to break client sites to ensure that various features are actually working the way we expect them to.

FWIW, you can't inform the clients or use focus groups for this sort of thing, because informing them or getting consent can create selection biases or other behavioral changes that can make the test group non-representative of the typical user. To get around that, most sites just bury a clause in their terms of service granting them the right to do this sort of thing. By using the site, you're consenting to the testing.