The news has been rife with stories about how social networks have been experimenting with its users. Facebook confessed that it meddled with the newsfeeds of 700,000 of its users, ostensibly to see if the posts they read would impact the positivity of the users’ own posts. (Conclusion: It did.) Then, in late July, the dating website OKCupid said it fiddled with users’ profiles all the time—sometimes matching users with people the site knew were bad matches.

In a post called “We Experiment on Human Beings!” OKCupid’s cofounder Christian Rudder made a startling admission that, really, we should’ve all known already.

“Guess what, everybody,” he wrote, “if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.” (OKCupid, Time)

Paul Asay has written for The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Beliefnet.com and The (Colorado Springs) Gazette. He writes about culture for PluggedIn and wrote the Batman book God on the Streets of Gotham (Tyndale). He recently collaborated with Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, on his book The Good Dad. He lives in Colorado Springs with wife, Wendy, and his two children. Follow him on Twitter.