You could be listed on a dating website (without knowing it)

A couple of Italians scraped 250,000 publicly available Facebook profiles to create a fake dating website. Are you one of them?

If you come across your partner’s name listed on a dating site, you don’t need to worry. Or rather, you don’t need to worry if the site is Lovely-Faces.com (but maybe your partner should be worried that you were on a dating site?). It seems that a couple of Italian chaps named Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic scraped 250,000 publicly available profiles, including names, locations and profile photos. The data was loaded into a fake dating site, Lovely Faces, with profiles being automatically placed into various categories such as smug, funny or easy going. Visitors can search based on name, location, category and gender.

Why did they do it? The authors say:

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. But that’s the very nature of Facebook and social media in general. 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. And how fragile enormous capitalization based on exploiting social systems can be. And it’ll eventually mutate, from a plausible translation of real identities into virtual management, to something just for fun, with no assumed guarantee of trust, crumbling the whole market evaluation hysteria that surrounds the crowded, and much hyped, online social platforms.

Okay, to me that sounds like pretentious and virtually nonsensical rubbish. But what this shows is that there’s a need to exercise caution when putting information online and to take the time to understand how it can be accessed and used (like you haven’t had enough reminders about that lately!).

Unsurprisingly, Facebook are not too pleased with the situation. According to Wired:

“Scraping people’s information violates our terms,” said Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s director of policy communications. “We have taken, and will continue to take, aggressive legal action against organizations that violate these terms. We’re investigating this site and will take appropriate action.”

That reaction is, however, somewhat hypocritical given Facebook’s origins. From Wikipedia:

Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not, and “used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person”.

Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network, and copied the houses’ private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student “facebook” (a directory with photos and basic information). Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.

Is your Facebook account publicly-accessible and, if so, have you checked to see whether you’re on Lovely Faces?