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.
I used it back during farmville days just to play farmville.
Then one day, they required my real mobile number to log in.
And that was it for facebook.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm sure they all carried cellphones into a grocery store one day. You think those advertising partners aren't sharing back the same type of demographic data with Facebook that Facebook is sharing with them? You think they don't have AI munging these databases all day long looking for esoteric connections between records? You think they care about the privacy of people who don't even use the site any more than their own users?
Maybe Facebook sucked in a big genealogical database at some point and started using it for the recommendations? If the information is out there there is a good bet Facebook and Google are adding it to their databases.
I read the internet for the articles.
Possibly Facebook's algorithm "mis" identified the friend as a face in one of her pictures (and because of genetics they would look biologically similar).
I'm more intrigued about how the one night stand got identified.
In all seriousness... Given the billion plus people on Facebook, and the many multiples of that potential contacts it shows, it's entirely possible that this is just a coincidence. I would wager it's a lot like the birthday paradox, that is, to have a 50% chance of two people in a group to share a birth date, you only need 21 people in the group. Between that, and degrees of separation and so forth, it's entirely possible for some weird distant link through many unconnected people to wind up linking you back to someone you know.
I've noticed connections between people I know from opposite ends of the continent, that to my knowledge would have no people in common, yet they have one connector, or two, or whatever. Basically she could have been your brother's friend's uncles's boss's neighbour's gardener, and if she was showed as a potential link, you'd have no idea about the connection.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
US Census records before 1940 are public record and available to anyone.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
FB makes connection when people get on FB using the same network connection or from the same vicinity, especially after multiple times...
FB recommended me a few people who are completely strangers but after seeing their face carefully, I realized I've seen them at a local bar few times.
Maybe they're buying DNA info from places like 23andme.com
And people should get that Facebook app off their phones.
You know, whatever page you load that has, for instance, a small embedded iframe that connects you to Facebook... So maybe they won't tell you how, because you don't have the necessary technical skills to get it?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
Keep using Facebook you dopes! LOL!
I would LOVE TO but I CAN'T! The BEST I can do to the waste of my storage that some utter prick pre-installed on my phone, is to disable it and stop it from updating itself!
Number in phone... Whatsapp?
---
I assume that this comment was intended to be somewhere between irony and trolling, in fact, I think it was probably intended to be simultaneously ironic and trolling.
The actual philosophy of fascism is not well understood in America any more. No, a fascist system would not "shut down" Facebook for creepy behavior: in fascism, corporations are powerful, but they work for the state. In a fascist system, Facebook would be even more powerful, even more creepy, and would work for the state.
I've had Facebook comments that were liked by an old girlfriend, my ex-wife and my current wife of 20+ years. If at any point they are able to compare notes, I'm pretty much fucked.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Facebook buys up lots of public records to feed their algorthms
That's supposed to be a feature, isn't it?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
DNA Analysis. Facebook and Me.
Then they can do even deeper linking of people. Maybe you can find out who your daddy really is and collect some back child support.
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.
You see that little 'f' logo in the upper right of slashdot's page? That's not a simple icon graphic with a link to Facebook. It's a complex script which drops a cookie or figures out some other way to track your computer, and reports which web page you viewed that icon on. So even if you don't have a Facebook account, Facebook is still tracking you. Not as you, but as user #92183656156.
Every time you visit a web page with that 'f' icon (most major sites), you are being tracked. And all it takes is one time when you enter an email address into a web page, and they're able to deduce that user #92183656156 that they've been tracking is in fact your_name@gmail.com, from which point they can cross-reference to deduce your phone number, home address, where you work, how much money you make, who your relatives are, etc. even though you don't have a Facebook account.
Yeah, what kind of monster goes around bringing long lost relatives together like that? Truly awful.
Yes... what's up with that? How much does facebook pay my phone company to not let me remove it?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I deleted my FB account 6 months ago. And, I mean I *DELETED* it.. I didn't "deactivate" it.
This week I found out that Facebook is still showing my old profile picture to people in People You May Know and encouraging them to send me an email asking me to join.
So, I guess you can never really quit Facebook.
No; you can quit Facebook. But Facebook will never, ever quit you.
Plain and simple. People who are not users of Facebook should not be dragged into Facebook just because Facebook wants to. Screw them.
In one way it is, but in another Facebook just actually connected two real life people in a possibly meaningful way. This is one of the BEST things I've seen of creepy Facebook, no ?
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
I recall reading some time ago that if you select two US citizens at random, there is a 1 in 30 chance that they have a mutual friend. I'm no statistics or probability expert (as you can probably already tell) but I would be tempted to ascribe the coincidental appearance of this person's great aunt as simple probability, coupled with 'cocktail party effect' name recognition.
The thing is, is that Facebook et al have access to truely massive data sets, that they can slice and dice in every conceivable way they see fit. They can use algorithms to identify correlations that an average person would never even consider making, and the results can be downright frighteningly uncanny.
Another example is when a father found out his daughter was pregnant because of marketing material from Target (I think it was Target...). I think even the daughter wasn't entirely sure. But Target figured it out by comparing her purchases with the purchases of other expectant mothers and found correlations.
This is the kind of power that Big Data can provide.
It's also why I'm very nervous about Big Data, because IMO this kind of thing is *too* powerful, and is just begging to be abused by disreputable people.
Often long lost relatives want to remain that way for good reason. It is not for facebook to make the decision of who knows about who. If facebook were a person devulging such information, it may very well be considered a serious breach of trust on one side or the other.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Alice has Bob in her contacts list on her phone
Bob has Alice in her contacts list on his phone
Bob has Caroline in his contacts list on his phone
Caroline has Bob on her contacts list on her phone
Bob doesn't use Facebook.
Alice and Caroline do, and use the mobile phone app to do so.
Facebook now knows that Alice and Caroline are linked through Bob, and probably have worked out how old Bob is if either of them recorded Bob's birthday. If Bob lives in North America, his cellular phone number would give away approximately where he lives. They probably also know his email address.
and that's without the various third party cookies and tracking beacons that they drop all over the web.
You conspiracy theorists need to keep your stories straight. There were no controlled demolitions in the world trade buildings on 9/11. Sure, the conspiracy theorists keep harping on about how jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel, even though the structural engineers have proven time and time again that the steel doesn't have to melt to collapse, just be softened and weakened by the heat.
However, remember the other big conspiracy about airplanes: Chemtrails!
Those planes had just taken off so their fuel tanks were full of jet fuel. The Chemtrail people will inform you that this also means that their chemtrail tanks were full of chemtrail chemicals! As we all know from high school chemistry (or high school musical 3? I forget which now...), the active chemical dispersant used in the chemtrails is Benzo-dioxy-teraphylone-glycosamate and it burns at a temperature of 3,723 degrees Celsius. This is more than hot enough to melt steel.
Of course the government can't admit that the planes were full of chemtrail chemicals because that would reveal the chemtrail conspiracy! So quit falling for the false fake conspiracy of controlled demolition, it is merely a counter intelligence psy-ops rumor designed to hide the true fake conspiracy of chemtrail chemicals!
Are people really this dumb? They let people import contacts. They keep the email addresses and phone numbers of their users. It's a simple graph query.
"When someone tells you who they are, believe them." - Maya Angelou
I am the Lindbergh baby.
They have a form you can fill out here, or you can email datarequests@support.facebook.com. If you actually bother to do this, write it up and submit it to Slashdot/Hacker News. I'm sure it would be of interest.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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'm guessing this is what happened:
People talk. At least one of the five people (your father, his father, and the two uncles and aunt whom your father met) must have told other people about the meeting. Then the word spread. "Hey guess what. Mr. Porter met his son, a man named Mr. Hill. Mr. Hill also met two uncles and an aunt. Mr. Hill has a son named X."
Then someone who heard the news researched to learn more about the family tree, to understand it all. (Some people just love that kind of stuff - family trees, abandonments and meetings - they just eat that stuff up.)
The person (P) who heard about it, and did the research, probably had a Facebook account. After they figured it all out, they probably posted it to Facebook. Facebook must have read and understood what P said about a family tree, which included someone named "X Hill" (you). If you use your real name in Facebook (X Hill), then Facebook must have linked you to the family tree that P wrote about.
Just a guess as to what happened, but it seems reasonable to me.
New firmware first, propper clean slate.
Why UNIX?
It is obvious to me that FB pay for info from other companies. Some other have mentioned clues that would indicate that this link probably came from Ancestry.com. When I was dating last year, I would get recommendations for women that I had met and went out with from dating websites. For the most part, the recommendations were for women that I didn't actually end up dating (the vast majority of them).
I thought that maybe the women had been checking out my background, but now I'm not so sure.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I wonder how easy it would be to poison facebook's data by entering random numbers into a few phones and letting it ingest this data...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Sites like spamdecoy.net are useful for that - sign up with an email address on there to get your free gift, then never use the address again...
You can also sign up for free email services like gmail, use it solely for receiving spam and then discard it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
She, herself may not have searched for you or anyone in your network, but people in her network may have done so. The shape and number of those connections may have revealed that bond. That's one way Facebook could divine these connections. Graph theory is neat and eerie.
Then there are the persistent rumours and stories about the hardware companies being required to put back-doors in their kit. Personally, I think back dooring export kit is a legitimate intelligence operation, but the rumours are that the vulnerabilities are going into all gear they ship.
The result is that all the American companies the intelligence communities care about are about are wittingly or unwittingly, working for the government and there are many Americans who think that is a good thing
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
correction, room 641a
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
IP addresses. I've been seeing people show up in my "people you may know" if they are using the same wireless nodes, even if we don't share friends on FB.
Look at the url you idiot! It's to facebook and the ip hit with referrer and user agent and time and network timing data and so on is a datapoint.
"Slashdot doesn't load any Facebook content." omg so much for nerds, they can't even view html.
Pft. Yeah, if that's even her real name.
sig: sauer
it's like the STASI never even existed. That's what facebook would become.
That's not the horrible part. What makes them horrible is that they do this with people who have not given consent.
That something good came of it doesn't actually make their practices acceptable, though.
Many, many times people I have no other relationship with have shown up as recommended friends a few weeks after we've exchanged phone numbers meaning Facebook obviously imports your contacts.
Since the father had the number perhaps he used Facebook once or perhaps he shared that phone number with another relative who used Facebook. A simple phone number matrix of friends of friends would provide the recommendation.
Facebook probably knows more about who knows who and friends of who knows who than the CIA.
In order to understand this you have to also look at how many people it "recommended" to you that you did not know. My guess is that number is extremely high. The fact that you found one interesting person in that mix of results is interesting to you. As a result your amazement is a form of hindsight bias. You think it is amazing because they connected you. In reality it is closer to luck brought by the vast number of connections available in Facebook. This hit or miss scenario is referred to as sensitivity and specificity. The number of hits that are actually connected (out of the number of total recommendations) vs the number that they did not recommend to you because they didn't think they were connected (thrown in the trash bin). To truly know how magically good the algorithm for suggested connections is you have to know both stats, and I don't know how likely it is that FB would give you that information.
Facebook comes preinstalled on nearly every phone. It then reads your phone contacts and uploads them to facebooks severs, which is likely how they made this connection.
Great sarcasm there. I almost believed you for a minute.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Stop using it. If you aren't paying for it, you are the product being sold. Until, and unless, users quit Facebook until Zuckerf*cker behaves different this will continue.
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.
Well that one doesn't take much speculation, Facebook by default wants access to your contact list and address book. And since most people let it do that your phone number and email address is bound to be recorded from one side or the other.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Like Mormons!
...but facebook *does* work for the state via PRISM.
At least on iOS, it has to request access to your contacts which you then have to allow.
Trolling is a art,
All Facebook suggested is that there was a connection. it didn't say "here's one of your distant relatives". As other replies point out, there are a billion ways a connection might be drawn. That was it. If FB had suggested a family relationship it might be a bit more mysterious.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
So both you and your aunt use Facebook and you mentioned that she exchanged emails with your father. I'm assuming you've also exchanged e-mails with your father. I've heard suspicions of Facebook attempting to log in to the e-mail account you used to register with Facebook. If your Facebook and e-mail passwords were the same at the time your registered, it would be possible for Facebook to scan all of your e-mail and create a comprehensive list of all your contacts. If both you and your aunt used the same passwords for Facebook and e-mail, then Facebook could know that you've both exchanged e-mails with your father and then recommended her as a "Person You May Know". It's just a theory based on a lot of conjecture but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
It does ask if you want to upload, and then you can say "NO!"
Naw, in a fascist state you would be required to register on Facebook.
Like Mormons!
HaHaHaHaHa!!! Exactly like Mormons! I dropped out 40 years ago, and I still get visits from the home teachers.
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"
1) Many phone companies upload your contacts for back up services.
2) Once uploaded, that information gets passed around. Facebook owns:
Octazen (contact importer)
Rel8tion (Mobile phone advertiser)
Onavo, Osmeta, Parse, Snaptu, Spool, and Strobe (all Mobile app developers)
Gowalla (GPS tracking company)
Whatsapp (instant messenger for phones)
The most likely companies are Octazen and Whatsapp. Either of them could have gotten the phone numbers into Facebook.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Weak network graphs populated through the wisdom of the crowds.
Inevitable.
If you install the facebook app on a phone, then it gets all your contact information. Same for linkedin or any other social networking app. You do not have to have an account with facebook. The app takes the data as part of its security permissions. So if your father or your aunt, both of whom had each other as phone contacts, ever had a facebook app on their phone, then the connection is in facebook's databases.
One thing I love about my el cheapo Moto E (2nd gen), no facebook etc, just the basic Google apps. Sadly the last security update was last year (Dec 1st, 2016).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
America is quite fascist (not Nazi, who were a weird mix). You have the "left" passing healthcare acts that benefit the insurance companies rather then the people, the "left" running a candidate who, economically, was to the right of Trumps claimed position (pro-workers, the traditional left base). Massive partnerships between the government and industry, where, when the government is not allowed to do something, they just get private business to do it. Government wants censorship, well the private movie industry implements all kinds of censorship and as it is private, it is fine. Government isn't allowed to spy, well pay industry to do it. That pesky Bill of Rights only applies to government you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The only country that has asked for my social media accounts is Canada. They are also the only one to have searched my phone. They believed I had no accounts, by the way. Curiously, I'm a citizen of both countries.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If Facebook and Google were combined it'd be game over, man.
Just who knows whom. Your friends moved, then there are all of those other connections. I get these notifications too, however they are almost always wrong. I know nothing about them. Don't let their success fool you. It's still just a guess.
If a person own such a phone, truly does not use Facebook, never created an account and has never agreed to any of their terms of service, does that make this an actionable legal offense by Facebook?
Long signatures suck.