At the 'Map me if you will' symposium at Pixelache 2011, Alessandro Ludovico presented the last project he worked on together with Paolo Cirio. Face to Facebook extracts portrait pics from the Facebook website and uses them for a fake dating website called Lovely Faces that is currently down. In addition, a project website documents this artistic intervention. Now new legal action was taken against the project. Here is the press release that Alessando and Paolo distributed on April 7.

Legal update:
After sending us a "cease and desist letter" (which led to making the website Lovely-Faces.com unavailable), asking us to give them back the 1M publicly available data and terminating our Facebook personal accounts, Facebook lawyers are continuing to follow up with us. First they are insisting on asking us to remove all the content from the Face-to-Facebook.net domain, which is the website documenting the project. This request sounds quite surreal for us: this website merely contains a collection of texts, materials and links related to Face-to-Facebook project. Even more, we have received a threat from Facebook legal department about the claim that the face-to-facebook.net domain name is violating Facebook's trademark.
So, why should such a big online corporation push a couple of artists to remove the documentation of their project? Our lawyers are investigating the legal basis of their request.

Global Mass Media Hack Performance:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/press-coverage.php
Meanwhile, the news went through to more than 1000 media reports, reaching a wide audience spread all over the globe. Very different stages were involved like: tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, blogs, portals and plenty of personal blogs, not counting the thousands of tweets. The pattern of propagation would need time to be properly analyzed, but it definitively is "viral", especially in some countries like Brazil, Pakistan, Greece, Turkey, Ukraine.
There are plenty of captivating scenes in this mass media performance, like for example the one where 93 per cent of the 7538 participants to the online poll opened by the Australian newspaper The Age answered "Yes" to the question "Should Lovely-faces.com require consent to use your photo?" Maybe that influenced also the blog "Ethics Alarms" to declare Lovely-Faces.com as "Unethical Website of the Month." And the controversial aspect of the project has been clearly picked up even by some popular U.S. TV news (see links below) sometimes resulting as quite bizarre.

Some selected TV News videos:
* MyFox LA, Los Angeles Fox News Tv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJYRM9VAtsE
* WSBTV, Atlanta WSB-TV channel 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye3Qyz-ojvI
* Newsy, Online video news analysis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlDs3PdGKSA
* Apple daily HK, Taiwan, China, Hong-Kong-based newspaper
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STSNZqoqk24
* Tagesschau, German public TV ARD channel 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzCh1XPWlMY

Some selected online Interviews:
* CNN, US - Art 'hacktivists' take on Facebook:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/02/11/artists.facebook.project
* 2010LAB (Video), Germany - Facebook and Transmediale - your face is ours:
http://www.2010lab.tv/en/video/facebook-and-transmediale-your-face-ours
* Artinfo.com, US - The Artist Who's Out to Liberate Facebook:
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36912/the-artist-whos-out-to-liberate-facebook-a-qa-with-profile-thief-paolo-cirio
* Artline, Switzerland - Sculptors of data  - Die Daten-Bildhauer
http://www.artline.org/?p=detail&id=10736&back=home&L=0
* Jetzt, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany - Feldzug gegen Facebook:
http://jetzt.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/519492/Feldzug-gegen-Facebook
* Politika, Serbia, newspaper
http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/spektar/zivot-i-stil/Uzeli-smo-desetine-hiljada-profila-iz-Srbije.sr.html
* Ha'aretz, Israel, newspaper
http://www.haaretz.co.il/captain/spages/1217717.html

Exhibitions and presentations of Face to Facebook during April:
* Share Conferences, presentation , Belgrade - Serbia
* ENTER Festival, exhibition & presentation, Prague - Czech Republic
* Chilling Effects, exhibition & presentation at TETEM, Enschede - The Netherlands
* REALITYFLOWHACKED, exhibition, Paolo Cirio's solo show at Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana - Slovenja
* EMAF 2011, presentation, Osnabrück - Germany