Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How (gizmodo.com)
Kashmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of "People You May Know," the social network's roster of potential new online friends for me. [...] She showed up on the list after about a month: an older woman, living in Ohio, with whom I had no Facebook friends in common. I did not recognize her, but her last name was familiar. My biological grandfather is a man I've never met, with the last name Porter, who abandoned my father when he was a baby. My father was adopted by a man whose last name was Hill, and he didn't find out about his biological father until adulthood. The Porter family lived in Ohio. Growing up half a country away, in Florida, I'd known these blood relatives were out there, but there was no reason to think I would ever meet them. A few years ago, my father eventually did meet his biological father, along with two uncles and an aunt, when they sought him out during a trip back to Ohio for his mother's funeral. None of them use Facebook. I sent the woman a Facebook message explaining the situation and asking if she was related to my biological grandfather. "Yes," she wrote back. Rebecca Porter, we discovered, is my great aunt, by marriage. She is married to my biological grandfather's brother; she met him 35 years ago, the year after I was born. Facebook knew my family tree better than I did "I didn't know about you," she told me, when we talked by phone. "I don't understand how Facebook made the connection." How Facebook had linked us remained hard to fathom. My father had met her husband in person that one time, after my grandmother's funeral. They exchanged emails, and my father had his number in his phone. But neither of them uses Facebook. Nor do the other people between me and Rebecca Porter on the family tree.
Usually I hate being Anon on here, but this one is a bit to important to not mention.
TL:DR my late step father used to pimp me out to a pedophile bicker friend of his. Happened when I was about 11 to 13. During that time I ended up having to... well be kind of shield for my younger siblings too. Fast forward until I'm about 19 and my step father dies from heart problems from the meth the aforementioned mentioned biker was selling him. No one in my immediately family was using Facebook at the time, but all of a sudden we start getting hangup calls from some number we don't know. We eventually found out one our aunts had been putting all of these family photos up on Facebook and tagged us all in them and given that she's an idiot about security.
Now, my story ended better than it could and the police were actually able to find my abuser since he already had some warrents on him as is. But non the less, the damage had already been done to the security and piece of my entire family.
The author of the Gizmodo article also wrote articles on a psychiatrist whose patients were appearing as "people you may know", speculating that the doctor had the phone number for the patients.
The author also wrote an article that suggests Facebook uses physical location.
The author has also put out a request for more than just speculation, and is looking for concrete evidence.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Plot twist: FaceBook can't tell her, because they don't know. They've long ago given control of this functionality to machine learning algorithms and primitive AI and they have no idea what it's doing either.
Yes. Very likely this. Or it could be blind luck and nothing more. Facebook is estimated to have over 2 billion users. They periodically suggest I may wish to know people who aren't related to me in any way, they just happen to know somebody I know. It could just be that maybe the author and this aunt both like, say, the same TV show and follow it on Facebook and that led to a connection that was pure luck and had nothing really to do with a family relationship.
I wish Facebook could find my relatives as I've got cousins on one side of the family that I've lost touch with. I found 2 of them by spending some time searching. Facebook didn't find them at all. And to show you how "nice" that side of my family is, both rejected my friend request on Facebook. The author probably doesn't know how incredibly lucky they were to get a message through to the aunt. If you aren't friends with someone on Facebook and send them a message, by default you go to a spam part of Facebook messages that doesn't open by default and the vast majority of users never look at because they don't know it exists. I've also found cousins on the other side of my family who did accept my friend request and in no way did Facebook help us to find each other. It actually took the blind luck of a cousin I am in touch with finding an entry on Find A Grave that another cousin none of us knew how to contact had placed there for a common relative. The Find A Grave listing had an email address that we used to ultimately get back in touch with 6 family members we'd all lost track of. So yeah, I am not convinced that Facebook really knows the author's family connection as much as they just suggested a connection for another reason and it was just pure lack that there was a family connection.
Facebook keeps showing me a person I might know and the only, ONLY, place I have ever seen the name before is in my Ancestry DNA match list. Never emailed. No common friends. We don't have a common ancestor in our trees yet and are about 5th cousins. The person lives in a different country, though I have visited the city and checked into places on FB.
I had some weirdness with Linkedin when it started sending me adverts and articles relating to living with someone with terminal cancer. Turns out one of my parents cats had colon cancer and they didn't want to tell me. So I would guess that the algorithms use a kind of diffusion process. Every person has their own unique ID number, then all bits of information about them get linked to that ID number. Each person also had links to other people. Then deductive logic can be applied. If someone is a skydiver, then all those links can be updated to have "knows someone who is a skydiver". Maybe this gets weighted by the number of people they know or how many links it takes.
Other time, I looked up something like "protecting property from grizzly bears" while renting an apartment downtown. Then I started receiving catalogs for bear traps, camo gear and hunting rifles.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I got on Facebook because, one day, in the mail, I received someone else's W4 form. I figured, "Hey, they may want this.", so I asked around. The apartment building manager was no help (I don't mean this in a negative way, though... she genuinely did not have a followup address for this person.), but I figured, what the hell, I'll check Facebook.
Only I didn't have an account. And you couldn't search Facebook (at the time, it may have changed) unless you had an account. So, I created one, with the intent of deleting it shortly afterwards.
Only, no luck on the search. Oh well. As a last shot, I went to a business around the corner, where I knew the owner. I asked (not expecting a positive answer), if she knew the person. She did. Shocking. Anyway, I passed on the W4, and went back to delete my (at this point) 20 minute old Facebook account.
I already had a dozen friend requests from friends and relatives. In 20 minutes. The hell?
But yeah, Facebook is creepy efficient about that sort of thing.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Eh, that was OK for me. It's when the FB app asked for my address book was when I uninstalled. I'm not authorized to give them all of my family and friends' info that they've trusted me with. Sadly, I don't think most other people take that kind of thing into consideration.
The mobile version of FB works fine. And you can even still use FB messenger in your mobile browser if you select "Request desktop site"
Remember Facebook creates shadow profiles for people they think they can track (such as via the website "like" feature) but they do not yet know the identity of, and they can work out the connections between shadow profiles.
It is feasible that they connected:
Facebook user1 -- shadow -- shadow -- facebook user2
Then said "user1, do you know user2?"
In a country with good privacy laws, such tracking would not be allowed. The USA is not such a country.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"