Mark Zuckerberg once got in trouble at Harvard for taking co-ed data from university servers to create FaceMash. Zuckerberg was slapped with charges of information theft tantamount to identity theft. Now that Zuckerberg’s Facebook is the biggest name in online social media, a couple of activists with a courting site think he still has a lesson to learn about information security. Cirio and Ludovico, founders of online dating website Lovely Faces, scraped 250,000 Facebook profiles for names, pictures and locations in order to get their site off the ground. Facebook is displeased the duo did not ask for permission, and the business might be preparing to sue. Facebook currently makes so much money that they most likely won’t need personal loans to take this business to court.
What lovely-Faces.com really does
Lovely Faces doesn’t have the permission needed in order to make the categories of “easy going,” “smug” and “sly” with the images from Facebook. User information is stolen to do this as well. Facebook user’s actual names were taken by Lovely Faces also even though the legality of it all concerns Cirio and Ludovico. The idea that it’s acceptable to put personal information on online social media is what is being challenged by Lovely Faces. They claim not to be a business venture, claims Wired.
“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.”
Social networks such as Facebook are being targeted by Cirio and Ludovico. The point is to point out cracks inherent in the system. In their minds, the exposure would ideally cause such networks to crumble into the dust bin of over-hyped stock evaluations, the place where many failed dot coms fell when the bubble burst in the early 2000s.
How Lovely Faces makes Facebook feel about it
Facebook Director of Policy Communications is Barry Schnitt who claims the social network’s terms of service are violated by scarping user information. Lovely-Faces.com is getting investigated by Facebook before legal action happens. Facebook has sued others before, such as the online protection research firm Skull Protection after it released 100 million Facebook user names and profile addresses. Zuckerberg and business may sue again.
Information from
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/
powderroom
powderroom
powderroom
powderroom