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> People who are trying to disconnect their Facebook identity from their real world identity are not using Facebook the way it's meant to be used and should pro
by gurkendoktor 11y ago
> People who are trying to disconnect their Facebook identity from their real world identity are not using Facebook the way it's meant to be used and should probably just leave it.
Some people use their pseudonym (usually a nick name) in real life as well, except for work, and I think separating work from Facebook is exactly how Facebook should be used. (There's always LinkedIn for work...)
Another thing I see a lot in Germany are (heavily) abbreviated names, so that all your friends know who you are in their stream, but stalkers/your boss cannot find you as easily. Tellingly, my female FB friends are much more likely to obfuscate their names (and get blocked for it).
> I'd love to hear an argument over why access to Facebook is a right together with your down vote.
Complaining about bad policies is how public discourse works, no matter if one has a right to better policies or not.
- Swizec 11y ago> Tellingly, my female FB friends are much more likely to obfuscate their names (and get blocked for it). This is the part of Facebook that's really creepy. As a guy who used to date around a lot, I was surprised by how well the "find user" function works. You connect with someone on Tinder, and meet up in real life. You have no friends in common, no digital connection other than a week-old Tinder conversation consisting of 5 messages. Neither of you checks-in to the restaurant you met up at. But when you type the woman's first name into Facebook (you don't know her last name), she will be the first suggested result. I don't know how they do it. But they do it. I'm assuming geo-tracking of phones and noticing that you spent X hours together the previous night.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> I don't know how they do it. But they do it. I'm assuming geo-tracking of phones and noticing that you spent X hours together the previous night. My boss and I were wondering the same thing after spending few days at client's site in another country, after which Facebook suggested the client as a friend to my boss, even though they never interacted electronically by means other than company e-mail. We thought about geo-tracking, but then concluded that it's more likely Facebook must have identified both of them were connecting to the same Wi-Fi network at the same time.
- kuschku 11y agoThis is insanely creepy...
- Swizec 11y agoSomehow the Wi-Fi network theory sounds even creepier than geo-tracking. Also in my example, I didn't usually connect to any Wi-Fi because I have LTE. But of course I don't turn off wi-fi when I leave the house so my phone still does network discovery.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoDoes it now? By Wi-Fi tracking I'm thinking of SSID matching (which are public information), not pinging devices inside a single network. Your data point about on-but-not-connected Wi-Fi supports both geotracking and SSID tracking. We need more data!
- techdragon 11y agoFacebook harvests a mountain of data about you when you use the new Messenger app. I swear the only purpose it has as a separate app is to be far worse than they think they can get away with the main Facebook app being. It's probably from the messenger data that they correlated your proximity.
- lukeschlather 11y agoWell, when you think about it they probably associate users who use the same IP address. From that perspective it's difficult to see how they could avoid using this data. It's like not noticing that two different people called you from the same number.
- Natsu 11y agoAnother possibility is that your social graph might have more overlap than you realize, even if it's not very much, it could be enough to make them the 'nearest' to you in some way. At least some of the graph data can come from sources invisible to you (i.e. people looking at other people's Facebook connections).
- nsgi 11y agoDo you have her number in your phone?
- Swizec 11y agoSometimes yes, sometimes no. But I don't remember giving FB permission to view my phone numbers.
- Nadya 11y agoIf you have the FB app installed it has access to your contacts.
- tedunangst 11y agoThere are phones for which that may not be true.
- Swizec 11y agoLet me rephrase, I don't want it to have access to my contacts and did not realize that it does. Now that I know it likely does, I am discomforted.
- zoul 11y agoAt least on iOS it doesn’t, unless you gave it the permission yourself.
- balladeer 11y agoHopefully in Android Marshmallow this feature is not again shot down just before release. Granular permission control is one single thing I am waiting for in Android 6.0 because that is the only feature I wanted to root my phone for.
- Estragon 11y agoWhat does the FB app give you that the website doesn't anyway? I had no idea why I would want it on my phone when FB was pushing it on me.
- yaur 11y ago> I don't know how they do it. But they do it. A big avenue for this is phone numbers. If you have exchanged phone numbers or texted and either person has the facebook app installed on their phone they may show up on "people you may know"
- CPLX 11y agoThis is almost certainly it. It comes from adding each other to your smartphones address book so a name shows instead of a number.
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- aianus 11y agoI don't see the problem. A friend request is hardly that threatening. If you don't accept his/her fb request, how can he/she bother you?
- Swizec 11y agoIt's not about the friend request per se, it's about being able to find people. A large part of your FB profile is public. At the very least, I now know your last name. Maybe even your birthday. In a lot of cases, that's enough to perform some light identity theft. Or I can find your exact address. Or I can find out where you work, or just see all the places you like hanging out at and so on and so on. I don't want to be that easily findable by strangers, which is why I consistently use a "fake" identity online and offline. It's still me, everyone knows me as Swizec Teller, the name just doesn't have anything to do with my legal first and last name. And my legal name is purposefully difficult to tie with this identity unless you have certain background knowledge.
- manigandham 11y agoThere are privacy settings for all of this... it's not forced in any way. Take the 5 mins to setup everything and it all works.
- zyxley 11y agoExcept in cases like those noted in the EFF's documents, where FB will change your publicly listed information without your consent and remove your ability to change it back.
- rmc 11y agoIt's almost like computer security. One little vulnerbility might be nothing. But it allows someone to pivot to something else. Which allows them to pivot to the next level. etc. etc.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
- robryk 11y agoCould it be that she has searched for and found your FB profile before you searched for her?
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- ferrari8608 11y agoIt's probably due to the Tinder app being tied to your Facebook account.
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- manigandham 11y agoI hear this a lot but I dont get it - Facebook has some of the most robust privacy settings of any platform. You can control exactly how much information you want the public and different groups to see. Also, most people who complain about public data are the ones who willingly share most of it in the first place without a care.
- grayclhn 11y agoThis is absolutely not true historically. I don't know what their privacy policies are now, but they have a track record of changing them with very little fanfare.
- manigandham 11y agoThe most important thing is public vs friends. And they've always had those basic settings for a long time... so again not sure what the big issue is. You can still just not put things online or not be friends with someone to protect yourself if you don't want to configure privacy settings.
- smt88 11y agoThey have responded to the criticism of their historical behavior and now only make changes with quite a bit of fanfare. They haven't done anything overtly evil related to privacy in a while.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago"Facebook hasn't abused their users much in a while, so I trust them to never do so again ever" is pretty fucking slim for someone whose career or life could be endangered.
- smt88 11y agoIt's possible to use Facebook in a way that couldn't endanger your life or career, depending on who you are. Obviously if someone is stalking you or something, that's a different story. But most people can just omit the information that they find to be sensitive and limit their friends list to people they trust.
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