A 'fake' dating website has launched which features 250,000 Facebook profiles that have been reproduced without their owners permission.

LovelyFaces.com claims to be an artistic enterprise that aims to draw attention to the identity theft risks sites such as Facebook pose, as well as the general contradiction of such a high value-business being based solely on the content of its members.

The website scrapped information from publicly accessible Facebook pages and then categorises the  unwitting volunteers into personality types, using facial recognition systems. As a result you can search for people in your area who are 'easy going', 'smug' or 'sly.'

Alternatively you can do your searches using the real names.

The site is the brainchild of media artist Paolo Cirio and critic Alessandro Ludovic, who stress the enterprise is purely a not-for-profit venture.

They said: "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."

They want to speculate that if people pull hard enough on that bothersome thread, Facebook's $50 billion valuation will unravel; something Facebook will not allow to happen, of course.

"Scraping people's information violates our terms," Barry Schnitt, Facebook's director of policy communications was reported as saying, "We're investigating this site and will take appropriate action."

Facebook's terms and conditions says that those who want to collect data from its pages first have to apply for permission, which has not been done by the LovelyFaces team. However, commentators point out a certain irony with this position.

Scraping semi-public data was exactly how Mark Zuckerberg first got into the social network business while still at University.
However the European-based Cirio and Ludovic promise to delete any profiles if the owners request them to do so.

Those wanting to see if they are amongst the LovelyFaces profiles might need to be patient. At the time of writing the website seemed to be down. A technical hitch? Or a legal one?