[aha] Art with 1M stolen Facebook profiles and a Dating website - Press Release

[KRISH]

it's fucking great
bravi


2011/2/10 Paolo Cirio <info at paolocirio.net>

> Press Release, February 10th, 2010. Somewhere in Europe.
>
> * Face to Facebook.
> http://face-to-facebook.net
> Face to Facebook is a project by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, who
> wrote special software to steal 1 million public profiles from Facebook,
> filtering them through face-recognition software and posting the resulting
> 250,000 profiles (categorized by facial expression) on a dating website
> called Lovely-Faces.com.
> The project was launched at Transmediale, the annual festival for art and
> digital culture in Berlin, on February 2nd, in the form of installation
> displaying a selection of 1,716 pictures of unaware Facebook users, an
> explanatory video and a diagram detailing the whole process. The
> Lovely-Faces.com website went online on the same day.
>
> * The Global Mass Media Hack Performance.
> On February 3rd a global media performance started with a few epicenters
> that after a few days had involved Wired, Fox News, CNN, Msnbc, Time, MSN,
> Gizmodo, Ars Technica, Yahoo News, WSB Atlanta TV, San Francisco Chronicle,
> The Globe and Mail, La Prensa, AFP, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The
> Independent, Spiegel Online, Tagesschau TV News, Sueddeutsche, Der Standard,
> Liberation, Le Soir, One India News, Bangkok Post, Taipei Times, News24, The
> Age, Brisbane Times and dozens of others.
> It was a "perfect news" for the hectic online world: it was about a service
> used by 500.000.000 users and it potentially affected all of them. Even more
> importantly, it boosted our inherent fear of not being able to control what
> we do through our connected screens. Exquisitely put by Time: "you might be
> signed up for Lovely-Faces.com's dating services and not even know it."
> At the end of the day Cirio's and Ludovico's Facebook accounts were
> disabled and a "cease and desist" letter from Perkins Coie LLP (Facebook
> lawyers) landed in their inboxes, including a request to give back to
> Facebook "their data".
> We can properly define it as a performance since it happened in a short
> time span, involved the audience in a trasformation, and evolved into a
> thrilling story. The frenzied pace of these digital events was almost
> bearable.
>
> * The Social Experiment.
> In the subsequent days the media performance continued at a very fast pace
> and what we still define as a "social experiment" was actually quite
> successful. Starting on February 4th the news went spontaneously viral:
> thousands of tweets and retweets pointed to the Lovely-Faces.com website or
> to articles and blog posts, often urging people to check if they (and their
> loved ones) were on the website or not. In a few days Lovely-faces.com
> received 964.477 page views from 195 different countries. Reactions varied
> from asking to be removed (which we diligently did) to asking to be
> included, from anonymous death threats to proposals of commercial
> partnerships.
>
> * Back to Facebook.
> We approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation about legal counsel, but
> after a second warning by Perkins Coie, we temporarily put up a notice that
> Lovely-Faces.com is under maintenance. But they are not ok with that.
> They want Lovely-Faces.com not to be reachable. And they even want the same
> for Face-to-Facebook.net, the website where we explain the project. So
> basically their current aim is to completely remove the web presence of this
> artistic project and social experiment.
> They missed out on Face-to-Facebook also being meant as a homage to
> FaceMash, the system Mark Zuckerberg established by scraping the names and
> photos of fellow classmates off school servers, which was the very first
> Facebook.
> Furthermore, it's a bit funny hearing Facebook complain about the scraping
> of personal data that are quasi-public and doubtfully owned exclusively by
> Facebook (as a Stanford Law School Scholar wondered analyzing
> Lovely-Faces.com). We obtained them through a script that never even logged
> in their servers, but only very rapidly "viewed" (and recorded) the
> profiles. Finally, and paradoxically enough, Facebook has blocked us from
> accessing our Facebook profiles, but all the data we posted in the last
> years is still there. This proves once more that they care much more about
> the data you post than your online identity.
>
> We're going to reclaim the access to our Facebook accounts, and the right
> to express and document our work on our own websites.
> And even if we are forced to go offline, Lovely-Faces.com will never go
> offline in the minds of involved people.
>
>
> Face to Facebook data:
>
> People who asked to be removed from the database: 56
> People who asked to be included in the database: 14
>
> Commercial dating website partnership proposals: 4
> Other partnership proposals: 9
>
> Cease and desist letters by Perkins Coie LLP (Facebook lawyers): 1
> Other threatened lawsuits or class actions: 11
>
> Anonymous email death threat: 5
>
> TV reports: 3
> Online news about Lovely-Faces.com (source: Google News): 427
>
> Number of times "lovely faces" introductory video has been viewed on you
> tube: 31,089
> Unique users on Lovely-Faces.com: 211.714
>
>
> Face to Facebook links (a few):
>
> Fox news LA (video)
>
> http://www.myfoxla.com/dpp/lifestyle/facebook-profiles-scraped-for-fake-dating-site-20110207
>
> WSBTV 2 (video)
> http://www.wsbtv.com/news/26781527/detail.html
>
> Tagesschau (video, in German)
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oOoASEjBpA
>
> Wired.com
> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/facebook-dating/
>
> The Age
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/facebook-photos-swiped-for-dating-website-20110206-1ailu.html
>
> Stanford Law School / The Center for Internet and Society
> http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6613
>
>
> Face to Facebook contact:
> http://www.face-to-facebook.net/contact.php
>
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