70,000 OKCupid Users' Data Leaked From Dating Site

In this age of technology, looking for love often means using some sort of online dating service. After all, what could be easier than filling out a profile, adding some pictures, and sending out a few messages? Well, it might be easy for you to fill out all of that information, but it turns out it's just as easy for someone to post all of that information for all the world to see.

Last week, 70,000 OKCupid users had all of their profile information leaked. A Danish researcher by the name of Emil Kirkegaard was studying information on the dating site, and was able to easily compile all of the data with relative ease. This included usernames, ages, sexual preferences, and more. And like any good researcher, he put his findings online.

While it's not hard to make a profile and browse through other users, many people didn't like the idea of having their information made publicly available elsewhere. OKCupid didn't take too kindly to having the info scraped from their site, either. The company claimed that Kirkegaard violated the site's ToS and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

After being threatened with legal action, the Danish researcher relented, and took the information down from his website. Afterward he stated that "all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it [in] a more useful form." He's technically right, as it appears anyone could easily scrape the data from OKCupid's site. Which makes one wonder why the company hasn't taken more steps to prevent data scraping.

Source: NYPost