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Facebook Is Using Your Phone's Location To Suggest New Friends (fusion.net)

Posted by msmash on from the privacy-woes dept.

Fusion's Kashmir Hill is reporting that Facebook is using your phone's location to suggest new friends. It's unclear exactly when the social juggernaut began doing this, but a number of instances suggest it only started recently. From the report:Last week, I met a man who suspected Facebook had tracked his location to figure out who he was meeting with. He was a dad who had recently attended a gathering for suicidal teens. The next morning, he told me, he opened Facebook to find that one of the anonymous parents at the gathering popped up as a "person you may know." [...] "People You May Know are people on Facebook that you might know," a Facebook spokesperson said. "We show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you're part of, contacts you've imported and many other factors." One of those factors is smartphone location. A Facebook spokesperson said though that shared location alone would not result in a friend suggestion, saying that the two parents must have had something else in common, such as overlapping networks.While this feature could be useful in some cases, many may -- and they should -- see it as a big invasion of their privacy -- Hill has succinctly explained a number of them.

3 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's amazing! by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your comment says a lot about your age. Fact is most people are not on Facebook.

    If we're talking about the United States and Canada... you're wrong. The population of the United States and Canada is 357 million people. According to this site, 222 million people in the United States and Canada use Facebook. Even subtracting for some people having two or more accounts-- apparently, most people in the US and Canada are on Facebook.

    http://www.statista.com/statis...

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    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  2. Re:That's amazing! by EkriirkE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'f you have an unrooted android phone with Facebook as one of the irremoveable bloatwares, it collects information in the background and transmits regularly despite you never having opened it, or signed in

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    from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
  3. GPS can be faked by magarity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I use an app that puts out fake GPS data for other apps. They all think I hang out at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave all day.