The Internet is a grand experiment in the macro, and within that framework there are many smaller tests being run on us, some unethical. The question is why is there no real comeuppance for companies, Facebook and OKCupid included, which abuse the rules–abuse us. I guess the answer is twofold: 1) It’s difficult to uncouple our lives from a social network when we’ve been unpacking it there for years, and 2) There seems to be something tacit in the new-media bargain that tells us that we’re not paying with money so there will be some other type of payment. And there is. From Dan Gillmor at the Guardian:

“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.”