<story><title>By ditching usernames, OKCupid is removing a crucial protective barrier</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/16812152/okcupid-usernames-controversy-anonymity-privacy-dating-online</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wwweston</author><text>If you think &lt;i&gt;this&lt;/i&gt; is big, by the way, make sure you take a look at their post from December 11th:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theblog.okcupid.com&amp;#x2F;why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-message-f14d492e7853&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theblog.okcupid.com&amp;#x2F;why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve completely obliterated the way messaging works. You will never see a message from someone unless you&amp;#x27;re either looking at their profile or you&amp;#x27;ve &amp;quot;liked&amp;quot; them.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an interesting model. But it&amp;#x27;s also essentially driving interaction through the matching bottleneck, which is at odds with the substance-over-selfie slogan, since it turns  incentives towards profile enhancement rather than investment in messaging. And it&amp;#x27;s also the kind of change you can&amp;#x27;t just blog-post explain away and expect to keep your existing users, just like the name change. It would be better suited for a new product than an existing one.&lt;p&gt;Then again, maybe dating sites work best with massive turnover in userbase anyway.  And even if not, that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean this isn&amp;#x27;t some of the sharpest possible product management out there. At least in the sense of responding to the incentives for people who want to develop their product careers, not necessarily in terms of actually improving the product.</text></comment>
<story><title>By ditching usernames, OKCupid is removing a crucial protective barrier</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/16812152/okcupid-usernames-controversy-anonymity-privacy-dating-online</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oxplot</author><text>I think most people who&amp;#x27;ve commented on the OKC post here and on their blog, are missing a few points:&lt;p&gt;1. Names can be faked. I don&amp;#x27;t see any long term and practical way for OKC to enforce real names (as FB and G+ showed in the past). So this is really a non-issue.&lt;p&gt;2. Photos are much more problematic because it&amp;#x27;s assumed that one cannot search based on a photo. A 5 second Google Image search on profile pictures from OKC however shows that a lot of people re-use photos they post on various social sites. It takes one of those places to have your real name next to your photo and you&amp;#x27;re identified! Google Image search is just the tip of the iceberg. It&amp;#x27;s getting easier and faster every day to compile database of photos and run a AI algo on it to recognize faces.&lt;p&gt;Any company who boasts protecting privacy of its users ought to find a way to protect against facial recognition.</text></comment>