Duo scrapes 1M Facebook profiles to create mock 'dating' site
Facebook is threatening to take legal action against the creators of an online "dating" site that features 250,000 profiles of men and women whose photos and personal details were scraped off the social networking giant's site and used without their permission.
The site, called Lovely Faces, was ostensibly set up as part of an attempt to demonstrate to the world how easy it is to misuse data that is publicly posted on sites such as Facebook. It allows users to search for men and women using their real names, or by categories such as "easy going", "sly" and "smug."
The site was available briefly earlier today, but was unavailable this afternoon. Paolo Cirio, an Italian media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, a media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine in Italy, are the site's creators. On a site explaining their caper, the two admit to using an automated bot program to systematically scrape publicly available information from 1 million Facebook profiles (PDF document), over a period of several months.
