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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.

6 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. OH FUCK by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The friend request is coming FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!"

    --
    Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
  2. uninstall the facebook app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    uninstall the facebook app and use the browser instead

  3. Who could object to this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This would be a great way to get to know the full identities of the other fun members of your AA group.

  4. Yup by nine-times · · Score: 5, Informative

    I noticed this a few months back. I noticed that I was getting a lot more friend suggestions of people that I didn't know, which was the first thing that made me curious. Facebook had always been suggesting that I friend people when I had mutual friends with that person, but suddenly it was suggesting that I friend people that I didn't recognize, and with whom I shared no mutual friends. So I started paying a bit more attention.

    Then I noticed that, among the random strangers, there were a few people that I did know but did not have any mutual Facebook friends and hadn't checked in at the same locations or anything else. That was my first tip-off that Facebook was trying to do something clever to link up friends, so I scanned the suggestions again looking for a possible pattern. Then I noticed that some of the strangers looked familiar. It took me a second to place them, but they were people who lived in the same apartment building or worked in the same office building. In some cases, it was people who lived in a nearby apartment building and got coffee from the same place that I did.

    They're definitely using location data to match people up. My only question is whether it's tracking your location all the time, only when the app is open, or only when you post.

  5. 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...

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  6. 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.