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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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Plain and simple. People who are not users of Facebook should not be dragged into Facebook just because Facebook wants to. Screw them.
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
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.
Pft. Yeah, if that's even her real name.
sig: sauer
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"