Online security and privacy experts are expressing their concerns regarding how tech companies protect their customers' personal data. Recently, a group of researchers released a set of data containing personal information of more than 70,000 users from the online dating website OkCupid.

The Denmark-based researchers released information including usernames, gender, location, personality traits, and thousands of profile questions used by OkCupid. The group had no intention to anonymize the dataset since they claim that it was already public.

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The data taken from OkCupid was subsequently posted to the online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology. The dataset was also uploaded on Open Science Framework, an online forum that encourages researchers to share their data to enhance collaboration.

In a statement, Aarhus University graduate student and head of the research group Emil O. W. Kirkegaard said, "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."

Many in the tech community are uncertain about the logic behind "public data." For professionals dealing in online security, this is a hard pill to swallow as it affects research ethics and privacy.

The "public data" excuse has been used by security researchers in the past. One of the most prominent occasion was back in 2008, when Harvard researchers released a dataset of four years worth of Facebook profiles acquired from more than 1,700 college students.

The same excuse was used in 2010 when a former Apple engineer used a flaw in Facebook's architecture to put together a massive database of names, fan pages, and list of friends from more than 215 million public Facebook accounts. The engineer, Pete Warden, revealed that he was able to amass more than 100GB of user data and laid out his plan to release the data publicly to aid future academic researches.

TagsOkCupid, online security, online security researcher, security and privacy, Online privacy, OkCupid data, OkCupid dataset