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The Feed: Face to Facebook

What would you do if someone stole your information from Facebook and used it to create an online dating website without your knowledge? Patrick Abboud reports for The Feed.

Bug exposes contacts of some on Facebook
A Facebook glitch has caused six million users' contact information to be inadvertently exposed.

2 min read

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By Patrick Abboud

Source: SBS


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What would you do if someone stole your information from Facebook and used it to create an online dating website without your knowledge?

That's exactly what one pair of Italian art hacktivists did. Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico have devoted the past 5 years of their life to prove a point about online privacy settings and just how blurred the line is between what's public and private information.

Their project Face to Facebook is the third in a series of hacks they've have been working on. Each targeting one of the world's biggest online powerhouses.

Their targets so far have included Google, Amazon and Facebook. Using facial recognition technology they then grouped 250,000 people, that had no idea they were looking for love, into categories like 'easy going' or 'smug' to create a fake online dating site.

The idea was to expose issues around what's private and public information.

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Although Face to Facebook was launched a couple of years back it's making waves again thanks to whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Snowden exposed a United States government program, PRISM, that was being used to tap into the biggest companies online and provide data to the National Security Agency.

It has sparked outrage all over the world with people concerned that governments have had access to their private information.

But the ironic thing is Facebook had Cirio and Ludovico's project shut down for the very thing Mark Zuckerberg did before starting Facebook.

The Feed's Patrick Abboud caught up with Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico while they were in Sydney recently.

The Feed airs weeknights at 19:30 on SBS 2. You can follow The Feed on Twitter at @TheFeedSBS2, or 'LIKE' SBS 2 on Facebook.


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