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New Fake Networking Site Cares As Much About Your Privacy As Facebook

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FAKEBOOK Frrvrr "CEO"
Social-networking sites like Facebook have already come under fire for a perceived lack of sensitivity in dealing with the privacy concerns of users. One new site, however, is rather upfront about its intentions to mine your personal data for totally nebulous reasons! Frrvrr.com is a "revolutionary tool for connecting and communicating with people that share your interests." How does Frrvrr (pronounced "Fervor") know with whom you'd like to communicate and connect? Based on your "browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and Web profiles," of course!

If it all sounds a little too "Big Brother" to be a legitimate business venture, well, that's 'cause it is: One of the sponsors of the March 10 Frrvrr launch party at the SXSW festival is popular satirical paper The Onion. Reached for comment, however, Onion president Sean Mills stuck to his guns: "My understanding, and it's really limited in terms of how their technology actually works, is that Frrvrr is using all legal sources of information to build realistic avatars for its users," Mills tells Radar. "I thought it was pushing it pretty far at first glance as well, but this new generation of Web users is actually less sensitive to privacy concerns, and I think their platform is based on that idea."

Never mind that the co-founder and CEO of Frrvrr is the Onion-esque Matthew Lesser, a sophomore at Kensington High School in Ithaca, New York (none exists, according to Google) who at the age of 11 "placed second at the Westinghouse National Science Fair with his innovative facial-recognition photo software, which was later incorporated into the Pentagon's TIA program." Or that the Frrvrr FAQ page boasts of such technology as the "AvaTroll Accelerator," which will "download itself onto your desktop and begin cataloguing your Web history, or "webtory," from the past eight months."

Come to think of it, actually, we're just surprised no one has coded something like this already.

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