OkCupid founder Christian Rudder released a new book on Tuesday that advocates for more widespread use of social media analytics--essentially, a closer examination of your Google searches, Facebook likes and Twitter interactions.
In the book, which is titled "Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)," Rudder calls OkCupid data "an irresistible sociological opportunity."
Mining social data for information has been a long-time ethics debate that recently flared up when Facebook revealed it had been conducting a social experiment with its users.
"The industry has so much data and the data are so accessible, they can do research on anything they want," said Elizabeth Buchanan, the director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, as quoted by the New York Times. "But just because we can do this with the data, should we?"
Rudder believes social media services have at least some right to survey user data since consumers are willingly providing the information. While the book mostly covers OkCupid since Rudder could access that data, Rudder has shared perspective on the Facebook situation as well.
"People love to hate Facebook, and they deserve it a lot of the time, but at the same time, no one's making you use Facebook," the 39-year-old Harvard graduate told Forbes. "If you're in there entering all this stuff about yourself, I have a hard time sympathizing with the person who then gets mad that they know all these things."
In a recent interview, Rudder offered a peek behind the scenes of sites like Facebook, OkCupid and Twitter. Everyday users don't usually know how often people are tinkering with the works, trying new ideas that don't pan out most of the time.
"[Users] think these websites are created from the minds of these geniuses like Tesla giving us whatever, but they're not," Rudder told Forbes. "They're so boring and crappy all the time, and people are always tinkering, and something launches and it doesn't work and it's a total failure. Nine out of ten ideas are bad."
Rudder's book points out the revelations available as tangible data in Google searches, Facebook posts and OkCupid preferences, all of which show more about people than they realize.
"You fold in data points like these for millions and millions of people, and you start to get a whole new picture of humankind," he said.
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