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Friday, February 04, 2011

Dating site steals 250,000 Facebook profiles

If you made any of your Facebook profile information publicly accessible for all to see, there's a good chance you are already a potential mate on Lovely-Faces.com.

The self-described online "dating agency" launched this week, and it already has a quarter of a million profiles. But then again that's pretty easy to do when you just run an algorithm to transfer over all the public profiles you can find on Facebook.

"Scraping people's information violates our terms. 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," said Facebook director of policy communications Barry Schnitt.

The pair of Web designers who made Lovely-Faces.com is arguing it only pulled the data to show it was possible, and claim it's an expression of "art" in the digital profile era. They say they'll remove anyone's profile if they're asked to, and insist it's more of a prank than anything else. But knowing how power-hungry Facebook is, they may have to pay for this prank.

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