OkCupid

OkCupid was originally owned by Humor Rainbow, Inc. OkCupid's founders (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn) were students at Harvard University when they gained recognition for their creation of TheSpark and, later, SparkNotes. Among other things, TheSpark.com featured a number of humorous self-quizzes and personality tests, including the four-variable Myers-Briggs style Match Test. SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its own site, later renamed OkCupid. In 2001, they sold SparkNotes to Barnes & Noble, and began work on OkCupid.

In November 2007, OkCupid launched Crazy Blind Date, a no-cost dating service that set people up on blind dates with little to no notice. The site served people in Boston, San Francisco, Austin, New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Daters would complete an optional questionnaire about their availability, preferred neighborhood for dates and their preferred type of date. They would meet up at an agreed upon location without knowing how their date would look ahead of time. In April 2010, Time Out reported that the website was under construction for updates, but would remain free once it resumed operation. In 2013, it was relaunched and integrated into the OkCupid platform as an app for iPhone and Android devices.

In 2008, OkCupid spun off its test-design portion under the name Hello Quizzy (HQ), while keeping it inextricably linked to OkCupid and reserving existent OkCupid users' names on HQ. However, the original Dating Persona Test has since been removed.

Since August 2009, an "A-list" account option is available to users of OkCupid and provides additional services for monthly fees.

In February 2011, OkCupid was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp, operators of Match.com, for US$50 million. Editorial posts from 2010 by an OkCupid founder in which Match.com and pay-dating were criticized for exploiting users and being "fundamentally broken" were removed from the OkCupid blog at the time of the acquisition. In a press response, OkCupid's CEO explained that the removal was voluntary.

In November 2012, OkCupid launched the social discovery service Tallygram, but retired the service in April 2013.

On March 31, 2014, any user accessing OkCupid from the web browser Firefox was presented with a message asking users to boycott Firefox due to Mozilla Corporation's new CEO Brendan Eich's support of Proposition 8. Users were asked instead to consider other browsers. On April 2, 2014, the dating site revoked the Firefox ban.

The website added a bevy of nontraditional profile options for users to express their gender identity and sexuality in late 2014. These options—which included asexual, genderfluid, pansexual, sapiosexual, and transgender categories—were added to make the website more inclusive. Through this addition, OkCupid popularized the concept of "sapiosexuality", meaning romance or sexual attraction based on intellectual, rather than physical, traits. OkCupid removed the Sapiosexual identity on February 11, 2019, following considerable negative feedback, specifically quoting an article on Vice Magazine.

Controversies

2016 data scraping and release

In May 2016, a team of Danish researchers made publicly available the "OkCupid dataset" project, containing (as of May 2016) 2,620 variables describing 68,371 users on OkCupid for research purposes (e.g., for psychologists investigating the social psychology of dating). The data release spurred criticism, and an investigation by the Danish Data Protection Authority.

2017 switch to using real names from pseudonyms

In December 2017, OkCupid rolled out a change that would require users to provide their real first name in place of a pseudonym as was previously encouraged. Although the company explained this badly, and quickly had to explain that a full name wasn't needed, and that nicknames or initials would be acceptable, the announcement was received with widespread criticism and condemnation for potentially raising the risk of harassment of individuals, especially women and minorities, to doxing. It was pointed out that, unlike other dating sites that encourage the use of first names, OkCupid "encourages long profiles full of intimate details, including candid answers to questions about sex and politics", making connecting that information with a real name more problematic to users.

Profile censorship

In 2017 OkCupid reported on Twitter that they had removed Christopher Cantwell's user profile for being a white supremacist after a woman reported receiving a message from him. This raised questions from some users who wondered about the ease with which the company could eliminate users from its platform.

User photos for data mining

In 2014, OkCupid shared without user consent images of users with Clarifai, a start-up specializing in computer vision, to built a face database, due to common founders in both companies. OkCupid settled claims with the Federal Trade Commission in March 2026 over the issue.

2019 alleged credential stuffing incident

A February 2019 report alleged that many users reported lost access to their accounts in a manner consistent with either a data breach or a widespread "credential stuffing" incident. "Credential stuffing" describes using passwords stolen from one service (like another dating site) to attack another service, on the assumption that many people will reuse passwords across websites. OkCupid denied any data breach or system errors.

Criticism

There is no function to remove answers to Questions, they can only be modified. Nor is there a way to bulk reset all answers before account deletion. This may cause privacy problems for users who wish to leave an empty account before they delete it to avoid it being used for data monetization by OkCupid. However, user commented questions are listed under "EXPLAINED" which makes it possible to manually delete the comments.