While the data was somewhat anonymous, it did include usernames, locations and personal information like sexual orientation, political leanings or turn-ons, and as Motherboard explained last week it wouldn't have been difficult to reverse engineer the data set to identify individuals. At the time, OkCupid claimed the scraping the site for data violated the site's user agreement and it now appears Open Science Framework is complying with OkCupid's DMCA claim. "The repository is currently unavailable due to a DMCA claim sent by OKCupid. Kirkegaard also edits a research journal called Open Differential Psychology, where he submitted a paper based on the data, but that paper is now subject to "internal discussions." After the controversy broke, Aarhus University distanced itself from Kirkegaard, stating that the OkCupid project was not part of his student work at the university.

On May 8, a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender, location, what kind of relationship (or sex) they're interested in, personality traits, and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site. When asked whether the researchers attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was lead on the work, replied bluntly: "No. This sentiment is repeated in the accompanying draft paper, "The OKCupid dataset: A very large public dataset of dating site users," posted to the online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal also run by Kirkegaard: Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data. However, 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. For those concerned about ...

The researchers, Emil Kirkegaard, Oliver Nordbjerg, and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær, used software to automatically scrape profiles and then uploaded it in a set onto the Open Science Framework, a forum and repository for scientists to share data. The info is only slightly anonymous: While no real names are used, usernames are connected with location and answers to the litany of personal questions OkCupid uses to find compatibility. Some of these, like political leanings or feelings about homosexuality, are quite private. As Kirkegaard repeatedly stated on Twitter, the data was indeed publicly available, but the scraping violates the dating site's terms and a possible legal matter, an OkCupid spokesperson told Vox. And, as Vox points out, it's also a breach of ethics according to the American Psychological Association, which states that people involved in research studies have the right to consent.