Lovely-faces.com boasted Facebook pictures of about 250,000 people searchable in categories that included nationality, gender, funny, smug, and "climber."
The creators of the online "dating agency" were identified at the website as artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic.
'Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook's constraints and boring social rules," the website authors said in an online statement datelined in Berlin.
The artists explained that a million "stolen" Facebook profile pictures were analyzed using facial recognition software that filtered images by expressions.
"Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions," the artists said.
