Karma hits Zuckerberg via Lovely Faces

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook experienced karma first-hand as Lovely Faces, a dating website, featured 250,000 profiles of men and women whose photos were scraped without permission from the social network.

Lovely Faces founders Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico used an automated software that scraped the photos and profiles of Facebook users over a period of time. In a site that explains their purpose for Lovely Faces, the duo was very clear about their plan: steal 1 million Facebook profiles, filter them with face-recognition software, and post them on a custom-made dating website sorted by their facial expressions characteristics. Here’s a more detailed explanation on how they did it. They also have a video to go with it.

At the bottom of the site is the fact that Facebook can be exploited and use for other purpose like identity theft. Maybe Zuckerberg can make use of his billions to combat this. After all, scraping people’s information is a violation of Facebook’s terms. Oh wait, Zuckerberg did the same thing when he scraped photos of women when he was still in Harvard to create FaceMash.

This should warn us of how open and trusting we are with the social networks that we have around.

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By the way, if you feel that your identity has been hurt by the site, you can simply write them and they will remove your data instantly. Yes, after your identity has been hurt.