0 'Dating' Site Nicks 250K Facebook Profiles Without Permission

The Social Network will remember how Mark Zuckerberg steal photographs from random academic websites and proceeds to use all that for his own website, which indeed based on a real life system dubbed FaceMash that Zuckerberg had pulled for real. Well, in a cruel twist of irony, a dating website named Lovely Faces has pulled the same trick on Facebook. The folks behind the website are pretty unabashed about it too.

The plot is simple; Lovely Faces rips profiles replete with names, locations and photos right off the publicly accessible Facebook pages. Using face recognition, the website classifies the unsuspecting victims into searchable personality types. For example, one can search for possible (and unwitting) mates in their vicinity based on parameters like "easy going", "smug" or "sly."

The website has been created by media artist Paolo Cirio and media critic Alessandro Ludovic who is also the editor-in-chief of Neural magazine. "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. 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," goes their explanation of the invasive prank they pulled on Facebook.

Facebook, however, isn't taking this lightly. Barry Schnitt, Facebook's director of policy communications warned, "Scraping people's information violates our terms. We have taken, and will continue to take, aggressive legal action against organizations that violate these terms. We're investigating this site and will take appropriate action." There seems to be legal merit to Facebook's threat, because scraping info from the website does require legal consent, which we presume Cirio and Ludovic haven't acquired prior to this stunt. 

However this may end; what you should do now is head over to Facebook and tighten up your privacy settings. And of course, never share personal information on social network websites.

0 Social Networking Apps Are Getting More Popular than Game Apps

As Smartphones are becoming an important part of every life's. SMSing and calling have becoming the top functions of mobile phones today. As we all know, these can be performed using different applications  that have been created on various platforms. Mobile phones have become home to many Games, News Feeds, Music, Social Networks and loads of other apps these days. Ever wondered what kind of apps are the most popular?

According to a global study by Nokia, social networking apps are the most popular in India. They are followed by music, business, utilities and games apps. This might have come as a surprise a few years back when social networks were not as popular as they are today. I mean, with one out of six people in the world being on Facebook, what did you expect? The survey further goes on to say that women (43 percent) are more active on social networks than men (38 percent), in India. A majority of 18-24 year-olds download and use social networking apps, the survey states.

A great  shock was that 77 per cent of people in India have up to 30 apps on their smartphones, with men more likely to download an app (93 percent) than women (87 percent). According to the survey, most smartphone users frequently rely on apps throughout the day (48 percent) while a further 22 percent log on and use them two or three times a week. Also, 17 percent of Indians only download the free apps available for their phone via app stores.
While social network apps top the list of apps actually used by Indians, music and social networks apps top the list of apps downloaded by users. With our love for Bollywood and Bhangra, this doesn't surprise me.

If we talk about global stats, Brazilians showed their appreciation for a party with 42 percent downloading music related apps including ringtones,  track recognition, and music mags. Germans found functional apps such as alarm clocks and flashlight (29 percent) the most appealing, while Indians prefer business-focused apps like email and expense managers.

Nokia, along with Professor Trevor Pinch, Cornell University's sociologist and professor of science and technology studies,  analyzed more than 5,200 smartphone users in 10 countries - India, Singapore, China, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and U.S. The study was aimed at gathering insights into the smartphone behavior of consumers in these countries.