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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.
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...
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.
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.
Or Ancestry's DNA test database.
"Looks like you share multiple alleles with these random people, would you like to introduce drama to your family tree?"
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!
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
Good thing you didn't google for "Enriching uranium with centrifuges."