>Dating on Facebook with Flyness: No illegal action required
Mark Zuckerberg once got in trouble at Harvard for stealing co-ed information from university servers to create FaceMash. Zuckerberg was slapped with charges of information theft tantamount to identity theft. That was 2003, but Wired reports that today, a couple of activists with an internet dating website want Zuckerberg to learn something about data protection. Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, founders of online dating site Lovely Faces, scraped 250,000 Facebook profiles for names, pictures and locations in order to get their website off the ground. Facebook is displeased the duo didn’t ask for authorization, and the company might be preparing to sue. Facebook already makes so much money that they most likely won’t need personel loans to take this business to court. Article resource – Lovely Faces scraped from Facebook without permission by MoneyBlogNewz.
All about Lovely-Faces.com
Without obtaining consent, Lovely Faces grabbed Facebook user information and classified pictures of male and female faces via a recognition algorithm into such categories as “easy going,” “smug” or “sly.” Lovely Faces also managed to grab the actual names of Facebook users, however Cirio and Ludovico aren’t worried about legality. Their claim, in accordance with Wired, is that Lovely Faces is not a business venture, but art which challenges the notion that an individual ought to feel comfortable with sharing personal information via online social press.
“If we start to play with the concepts of identity theft and dating, we should be able to unveil how fragile a virtual identity given to a proprietary platform can be,” write the Lovely Faces founders on Face to Facebook. “And (we’ll see) how fragile enormous capitalization based on exploiting social systems can be.”
What Cirio and Ludovico aim to do to Facebook and any large-scale monetized online social network is shine a light on the cracks inherent in the system. They are hoping to make the networks crumble from over-hyped stock evaluations just like in the early 2000s when the bubble burst stopping many dot coms.
How Lovely Faces makes Facebook feel about it
There’s a violation of Facebook’s terms of service according to Barry Schnitt. He is the Director of Policy Communications at Facebook. Facebook isn’t just jumping to take legal action. The company has to investigate Lovely-Faces.com first. After 100 million Facebook user names and profile addresses were released by the online protection research firm called Skill Security, Facebook sued them. Zuckerberg and company might prosecute again.
Articles cited
Face to Facebook
face-to-facebook.net/theory.php
New York Times
bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/100-million-facebook-ids-compiled-online/
Wired
wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/facebook-dating/