How Two Artists Stole 1 Million Facebook Profiles

Privacy concerns have long been a contentious topic online, with sites like Google and Facebook being the targets of much user outrage and skepticism for their controversial user data harvesting and selling policies. The rally cries hit fever pitch every few months or so, then 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.”

Screenshot of the Lovely-Faces dating website created with stolen Facebook profile data.

The artists explain Face to Facebook:

In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook's exclusive property, we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures). Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves
intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions.

Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook's constraints and boring social rules. So we established a new website (lovely‐faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data.

Each project takes the form of both a web initiative and a physical installation. The Face to Facebook installation is currently on view at Transmediale.11 in Berlin, Germany.

Face to Facebook installation shots from Transmediale.11.

This is not the first time artists have taken these behemoth corporations to task in an effort to expose the, largely invisible, behind-the-scenes systems that exploit user information for financial gain. The hacker collective FAT Lab has created such applications as Jamie Wilkinson’s Google Alarm and the team’s F*ck Google project from Transmediale.10. FAT member Tobias Leingruber even created a project very similar to Face to Facebook back in 2006 using profiles harvested from the German Facebook equivalent, Studivz, which he then matched up in a random series of “love connections” in the project, Lovebot.

Will these artists’ efforts to raise awareness about privacy and personal data online lead to actual policy changes on behalf of these corporations? Probably not. But for those of us paying attention, they definitely expose the flaws and fallibility of these supposedly “free” online services that we are so quick to take for granted and place our trust in.