Seems I'm writing more and more about Facebook these days, sadly. There is an article at the link I provided below [Read More] that I'm certain you'll find enlightening. The one point the author made was the first one I though of when I saw that Facebook was scraped for these profiles. Ironically, that is how Founder Mark Zuckerberg got his start.

Information and photos where taken off of public Facebook pages, using a method called "scraping," and then re-used it for this site (Lovely-Faces.com). They used facial recognition programs to catalog faces as "sly" or "easy going"  but people can also be looked up by name. Unfortunately, the two were supposed to get Facebook's permission before taking the data. Oh, you mean you weren't asked permission by Facebook? Of course not, it's Facebook's data now, not yours (read the end user agreement, the one nobody ever does.)

I have long been a critic of Facebook's security practices and how it handles/sells your personal data, so this is really not a shock to me. Facebook should have to change its privacy settings. Because the site does allow users to have a public profiles by default, they may have to change that policy in order to protect Facebook from lawsuits that could be filed for not protecting the privacy of their users.

[Read More...]