How Facebook Outs Sex Workers (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report: Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them. Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse). Her "real identity" -- the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics -- joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook's "People You May Know" recommendations, Leila (a name I'm using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients. Despite the fact that she'd only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people -- and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them. Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again. "We're living in an age where you can weaponize personal information against people"Kashmir Hill, the reporter who wrote the above story, a few weeks ago shared another similar incident.

Comments

Their app reads your contacts...

[emil]

...and this is how it knows who you associate with. In later versions of Android (and perhaps in iOS), you can deny permissions to read your contacts, but the app will likely work hard to get around that.

If you have contacts on your phone that you don't want Facebook to know about, then you must not load their app

- only access them through a dedicated, privacy-focused web browser (or an equivalent sandboxing app).

I like FaceSlim on F-Droid. I would never, ever run their app. That thing is a monster.

Re:Their app reads your contacts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. I have two accounts. One which I've used for years on my personal laptop, and a second one I recently created behind a VPN and which I've only used from a separate laptop, within a private Chrome tab, with no personal details at all. There is absolutely no link between the two accounts, other than my own eyes looking at both. No pics, no FB app, nothing.

Two weeks after I created the new account, FB started suggesting friends from my old account. I'm not sure how they do it but it's truly terrifying.

Re:Simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a fix anymore. They have managed to build profiles on almost anyone. How do they know your bank account information if you don't have a FB account? How do they know it if you do and have never used your bank account with it? This has gone beyond scary.

Re:The real problem is

[dgatwood]

Close. The real problem is carrying a cell phone with the Facebook app on it, signed in with your account, while doing things you don't want Facebook knowing about. All they have to do is correlate the GPS locations from multiple devices to detect that two people are repeatedly in the same location at the same time.

Re:And now skype

[Anonymous Coward]

There WASN'T two accounts-- she DID NOT HAVE an account for her professional work.

Seriously, how hard is it to read a damn article before taking the know-it-all route.

Re:And now skype

[Lord Kano]

According to the summary(That you obviously didn't read), she only has a FB account that's linked to her real life identity.

Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all

There is no other account for FB to conclude is owned by the same person.

Whatever is happening isn't what you think is.

LK