January 15, 2013 ("Love is Blind Day") and analyzed user responses to messages, conversations, and contact details. When the photos were restored, users who had started "blind" conversations gradually began tapering off their conversations, leading OkCupid's CEO Christian Rudder to remark "it was like we'd turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight". In a separate A/B test, OkCupid used a placebo number instead of users' true match percentage. The results suggested that doing this caused users, who were "bad matches" under the original algorithm, to actually like each other: "When we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are." Rudder explained that it would be unethical not to experiment on users: I think part of what's confusing people about this experiment is the result ... this is the only way to find this stuff out [what actually works for a dating site], if you guys have an alternative to the scientific method I'm all ears. Controversies 2016 data scraping and release In May 2016, a team of Danish researchers have 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 and subsequent backpedal 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 quickly backpedaled by saying 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