Media Artists Start Prank Dating Site… and YOU Might Be On It

You may want to check out Lovely-Faces. Yeah it’s a dating site – and we’re not saying you’re desperate. The fact of the matter is, you may already have a profile here. In fact, it’s only day one, and there are already 250, 000 members. Now that’s growth.

Media artist Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic, editor in chief of Neural magazine designed the site not as a sly attempt to earn money, but as art, they say. Click the link to hear them explain it far better and with more convolution than this writer ever could. They’ve gathered their information by gleaning what they can from public profiles, and with it have organized a searchable database of users you can peruse by personality (using facial recognition technology), or just by name.

“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,” explain Cirio and Ludovic. “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 honestly, they’re right. But Facebook isn’t laughing – after all, Facebook’s terms require parties who want profile information to apply for the right to do so, and of course, Ludovic and Cirio haven’t done that, instead merely scraping readily-available public information. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lovely-Faces is down by the time you read this. But while it lasts, it’s an interesting comment on the true integrity of one’s privacy, particularly in the case of Facebook.

As for Lovely-Faces… if anyone gets a genuine hookup, be sure to let us know.