Last week, a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid. Now, they're facing major backlash from the scientific community, which is questioning the ethics of their methods.The researchers were able to obtain the information by using software to automatically scrape profiles.The OkCupid dataset included usernames, ages, genders, locations, what kind of relationship (or sex) users are interested in, personality traits, and answers to the site's thousands of profiling questions. The researchers did not make any users anonymous or ask for consent.The researchers stand by their decision to use the data, saying, "Data is already public.” According to Wired , the head researcher, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, added in an online journal's forum ( which has since been suspended for legal reasons), "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."