Hacktivists steal 250,000 Facebook profiles, put them on fake dating Website

Do you want your Facebook profile to show up on a dating site without your permission? Unfortunately, it may have already happened. CNN reports that Lovely-Faces.com opened its doors this week with a million user profiles already listed in its dating directory, complete with facial recognition technology that auto labels each of the profiles with words like "easy going," or "sly." The site obtained these profiles by using technology to scrape (steal/copy) a million public profiles directly from Facebook.

Oddly, the duo behind the site claims to be doing it for the betterment of mankind. In a post on Face-to-Facebook.net, Paolo Cirio, an artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, editor-in-chief of Neural magazine, explain the problems with Facebook and their latest attempt at hacktivism.

"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," says the duo. "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."

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