Website Lovely Faces scraped data from Facebook in order to prove a point about the fragility of online social networks and data security. (Photo Credit: CC BY-ND/TMCNet)

In 2003, then Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg scraped the names and photos of co-eds from university servers in order to create a “hot or not” site called FaceMash. Zuckerberg, who would go on to found Facebook, was accused of stealing data and identities. Today, Wired reports that a media artist and a media critic have decided that turnabout is fair play when it comes to Zuckerberg’s ultimate creation. Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s social experiment dating website called Lovely Faces recently went online after scraping 250,000 Facebook profiles for names, locations and pictures – and Facebook is threatening to sue.

Lovely-Faces.com: Take ‘em and tag ‘em

Without obtaining consent, Lovely Faces grabbed Facebook user data and classified photos of male and female faces via a recognition algorithm into such categories as “easy going,” “smug” or “sly.” Lovely Faces also managed to grab the real names of Facebook users, but Cirio and Ludovico aren’t concerned about legality. Their claim, according to Wired, is that Lovely Faces is not a business venture, but art that challenges the notion that people should feel comfortable with sharing personal information via online social media.

“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,” write the Lovely Faces founders on Face to Facebook. “And (we’ll see) how fragile enormous capitalization based on exploiting social systems can be.”

What Cirio and Ludovico aim to do to Facebook and any other large-scale monetized online social network is shine a light on the cracks inherent in the system. In their minds, the exposure would ideally cause such networks to crumble into the dust bin of over-hyped stock evaluations, the place where many failed dot coms fell when the bubble burst in the early 2000s.

Facebook doesn’t appreciate Lovely Faces ‘art’

Barry Schnitt, the Director of Policy Communications at Facebook, insists that scraping user data violates the social network’s terms of service. Thus, Facebook is currently investigating Lovely-Faces.com before taking legal action. Facebook has sued others before, such as the online security research firm Skull Security after it released 100 million Facebook user names and profile addresses. Zuckerberg and company may sue again.

Sources

Face to Facebook

New York Times

Wired

Dating on Facebook with Flyness: No illegal action required

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook announcement unveiled new features that give Facebook users more flexibility and control over their information. Image: CC yonghokim/Flickr.

The Facebook announcement on Oct. 6 was a big letdown for people expecting a radical redesign, Facebook phone or a Skype videochat partnership. Instead, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a modest set of new features that gives users more control over their information. The new features unveiled in the Facebook announcement include the ability to download information from Facebook, a central dashboard to control app permissions and a groups function that offers more flexibility in creating social circles.

Facebook Groups

At the Facebook announcement at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Zuckerberg said the biggest change is the upgrade to Facebook Groups. The New York Daily News reports that Facebook users can now create sets of friends and share information solely with that circle of friends. Zuckerberg said the Groups upgrade draws from Facebook Photos, where 95 percent of users are tagged in photos by friends. According to him, Facebook Groups gets rid of user inhibitions stemming from the reluctance to send out information that doesn’t apply to all their friends.

Download Your Information

The new Facebook feature called Download Your Information allows users to download everything from a Facebook account. The download option takes photos, videos, status posts, wall posts and events and puts it all into a single compressed file. Eric Sherman at bNET said that Download Your Information is a slick move because when people know they can walk away without losing everything, they feel safer. He writes that the combination of safety and control will help keep people from deleting their Facebook accounts.

Facebook app permissions dashboard

Facebook privacy issues have been a public relations thorn in the company’s side. A new apps dashboard lets Facebook users concerned about privacy see all Facebook third party apps they use and what permissions those apps have. App permissions can be changed or revoked from the dashboard. Now users can know what kind of information third party apps are trying to collect and control what they actually can obtain.

If there's a face under there, Facebook's lawyers would like a word. (Photo Credit: CC BY/William Berger/My Castle of Quiet)

Facebook is facing off with U.S. courts once more, reports TechCrunch. However, this time it has nothing to do with bullying websites TeachBook or PlaceBook into changing their names because they dared to use the word “book.” Now, Facebook is attempting to trademark the word “face,” picking up where U.K. company CIS Internet Limited left off in 2008. Facebook has purchased CIS’s trademark application and is moving forward.

Facebook’s trademark move: a good way to lose face

Facebook’s attempt to trademark “face” isn’t a complete surprise. In terms of corporate branding, trademarks are a big deal, but sometimes things get a little out of hand. A man once attempted to trademark “ganja” in court. The website Fark.com once attempted to trademark “NSFW.” And then there’s Snooki from “The Jersey Shore,” who tried to trademark her nickname so that nobody else could cash in on that train wreck of a brand. Facebook will lose face just like the rest of them for their waste of the legal system’s time.

Aaron Greenspan objects

The same Aaron Greenspan who once claimed that he helped Mark Zuckerberg create Facebook is against the company’s attempt to trademark “face.” Greenspan’s company Think Computer created a mobile payments app called FaceCash, and if Facebook gets its desired “face” trademark, Greenspan would have to pay. So would Apple, whose Facetime video calling app appears on the iPhone 4. Greenberg and no doubt many other entrepreneurs would appreciate being able to use the generic term in naming future products.

Facebook, wipe the egg off your face and move on

Considering how aggressive Facebook has been in defending its trademarks in the past, there’s little doubt that it will pursue unlicensed “face” users with atomic fury. Perhaps individuals with no corporate aspirations at all will have to be careful, or the Zuckerberg express will enter their homes like a thief in the night and legally claim their faces. Think of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in the film “Face/Off,” or the characters in the Kobo Abe novel “Face of Another.” See how much trouble they got into over faces? Even a Tleilaxu face dancer from the “Dune” books wouldn’t be able to hide.

Sources

Facebook’s patent application for “FACE”

TechCrunch

Wikipedia