Ryan Singel reports:
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 LovelyFaces.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.
[…]
Cirio and Ludovic say they will take down a user’s profile, if a person asks and the site doesn’t have any indication they are actually trying to make any money. Instead, it’s part of a series of prank sites, the first two of which aimed at Google and Amazon, intended to make people think more about data in the age of internet behemoths.
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