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How Two Artists Stole 1 Million Facebook Profiles

hen die down until the next wave of privacy-compromising updates are released. Meanwhile, most people continue to use these sites without much regard for the safety of their personal information because, well, everyone uses them, it’s hard not to—they’ve essentially succeeded in establishing monopolies in their respective markets.

Media artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico have been creatively undermining and exploiting (in good humor, of course) these massive online corporations in a series of projects called The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy. The duo uses custom programmed software to create conceptual hacks that generate unexpected holes in the “well oiled marketing and economic systems” of the three biggest kahunas in the online space: Google, Amazon and, most recently, Facebook.

In their first two projects, Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir, they built software that stole data sensitive to each respective corporation—with Google it was the “clicks” on their AdSense Program, with Amazon they stole the content of entire books and gave them away as free PDFs. In the latest and final installment of the series, Face to Facebook, they stole 1 million public profiles, filtered them with face-recognition software and posted a selection of 250,000 profile images on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics. The goal of these three projects is not to generate money or personal economic advantage, but rather “to twist the stolen data or knowledge against the respective corporations.”

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http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/how-two-artists-stole-1-million-facebook-profiles

Feb. 8, 2011

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