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In 2003, then Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg scraped the names and photographs of co-eds from university servers to be able to develop a “hot or not” website called FaceMash. He was charged with various offenses that bordered on identity theft. Now that Zuckerberg's Facebook is the biggest name in online social networking, a couple of activists with a dating website think he nevertheless has a lesson to find out about data security. Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, founders of online dating website Lovely Faces, scraped 250,000 Facebook profiles for names, pictures and locations in order to get their website off the ground. Facebook is displeased that the duo didn't ask for authorization, and the business might be preparing to sue. Facebook currently makes so much money that they likely won't need personal loans to take this business to court.

Lovely-Faces.com information

Without obtaining consent, Lovely Faces grabbed Facebook user information and classified photos 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 real names of Facebook users, but Cirio and Ludovico aren't concerned about legality. Wired explains that they claim Lovely Faces isn’t for business however for art challenging the idea of sharing online social media personal information.

“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.”

The cracks inherent in the system is what Cirio and Ludovico try to do with Facebook and other social networks. They're hoping to make the networks crumble from over-hyped stock evaluations just like in the early 2000s when the bubble burst stopping several dot coms.

The way Facebook responds to Lovely Faces

There is a violation of Facebook’s terms of service according to Barry Schnitt. He is the Director of Policy Communications at Facebook. Facebook is not just jumping to take legal action. The company has to investigate Lovely-Faces.com first. There have been lawsuits by Facebook before such as the one where Skull Security was sued as an online security research firm. This was after 100 million Facebook user names and profile addresses were released. Another lawsuit might interest Zuckerberg. This is very possible.

Citations

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/

Dating on Facebook with Flyness: No illegal action required

youtube.com/watch?v=1D51lBv1Hac