Facebook Profiles Scraped for Fake Dating Site

Los Angeles - The Lovely Faces website -- which, at first glance, looks like a dating site -- is getting a lot of attention, but it's not for the reason you'd think. It turns out that the site is fake... just a social commentary on privacy in the age of Facebook.

Lovely-Faces.com lets you peruse profiles and admire photos -- some 250,000 of them -- all of them scraped from Facebook profiles.

Ryan Singel, Wired.com:
They went and they scraped FB... meaning they took the information that people had publically accessible and put them on a dating site without their permission.

Ryan Singel, Wired.com:
Projects like this are good for us to stop and think a bit. How do we want be on the Internet? Why don't we have better choices of how public we are?

We showed people the Lovely Faces website. It got a "thumbs down" as a dating site, but opinions got a lot stronger when we explained how those profiles were collected or scraped.

Facebook isn't amused, but so far no legal volley has been enough to bring Lovely Faces down.

By the way, if you find your picture or information on the site and inform the Lovely Faces producers, they say they'll take it down immediately.