‘Dating’ Site Imports 250,000 Facebook Profiles, Without Permission | Epicenter�| Wired.com:
"How does a unknown dating site, with the absurd intention of destroying Facebook, launch with 250,000 member profiles on the first day?
Simple.
You scrape data from Facebook.
At least, that’s the approach taken by two provocateurs who launched Lovely-Faces.com this week, with profiles — names, locations and photos — scraped from publicly accessible Facebook pages. The site categorizes these unwitting volunteers into personality types, using a facial recognition algorithm, so you can search for someone in your general area who is “easy going,” “smug” or “sly.”
Or you can just search on people’s real names.
The duo behind the site say it’s art, not commerce.
In what seems to be liberal-arts-grad-schoolese, Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine, explain why they made the site.
“Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating — unfortunately, without the user’s control,” the two explain. “But that’s the very nature of Facebook and social media in general."
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