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It did years ago :) When i didn't had account they already know my name, mail, telephone number, because some idiots gave them their mails login & passwords, al

by dzek69 10y ago

It did years ago :) When i didn't had account they already know my name, mail, telephone number, because some idiots gave them their mails login & passwords, allowing FB to read all contacts. I wasn't on Facebook, yet in the "hey, join FB" message they listed 6 of "people I know that are already of Facebook". So imagine how much data they got about me: 1) No account on FB 2) But FB tracked me with their cookies on almost every page, because almost every page has some FB widget (fanpage box, like buttons etc) 3) They know "some-random-guy-9348239849" likes to browse pages A, B, C, D, which means he likes AA, AB, BA, BB, BC, CA, DA activities 4) Then people start giving away "their" data about me. A lot of them did, so FB could connect who I know, and their connections with each other. 5) So FB got "my-name-PERSONAL_DATA", not associated with the data from point 3. 6) I got that message 7) If I'd click the welcoming link, then I wouldn't even need to register - FB then could connect that "some-random-guy" data with "my-name" data. This probably goes even deeper, but we just don't know that. Facebook with that message told me way too much about how much they know about unregistered users, I bet they don't do this anymore :)

csydas 10y ago
Yep, what you're describing is what I believe is called "Shadow Profiles", and they've been unapologetically doing it for years. Very likely, even if you have all the privacy extensions and jsblockers installed on your computer, or even if you go full RMS and only wget once a day to get your daily content and email, odds are Facebook has a full profile on you because of the people in your life who leak the information about you. Your folks filling out a form on Facebook saying that they have X children, your friends sharing their contact list with LinkedIn/Google/Facebook and you're on it, your workplace profile being crawled, and so on. Unless you go full on hermit, there's really no way to not be part of Facebook either actively as a user or passively as a shadow profile. Exfiltrating this data, or even so much as seeing the entirety of it also appears to not be possible to see what bits of your information have been gathered, to know who has access to it, to know what it's being used for, or even to deny them the ability to make profit on this information. It's incredibly frustrating, as if any individual citizen were to do this sort of reconnaissance and data gathering on another citizen, it'd be called stalking, and people would have legal means to redress. But the fact that even those who have not agreed to the Facebook TOS are still profiled and sold and used for profit without the aforementioned persons' consent seems very wrong.
clydethefrog 10y ago
This also happened to me with Twitter. Had to use it for an experiment, used random data but they needed my phone number for verification. I used an old sim card I still had lying around and suddenly as suggestion all my high school friends popped up as suggestion. The only thing they needed to know was my number to figure out my entire social network because of my friends sharing their digital address book.

by dzek69 10y ago

csydas 10y ago

Yep, what you're describing is what I believe is called "Shadow Profiles", and they've been unapologetically doing it for years. Very likely, even if you have all the privacy extensions and jsblockers installed on your computer, or even if you go full RMS and only wget once a day to get your daily content and email, odds are Facebook has a full profile on you because of the people in your life who leak the information about you. Your folks filling out a form on Facebook saying that they have X children, your friends sharing their contact list with LinkedIn/Google/Facebook and you're on it, your workplace profile being crawled, and so on. Unless you go full on hermit, there's really no way to not be part of Facebook either actively as a user or passively as a shadow profile. Exfiltrating this data, or even so much as seeing the entirety of it also appears to not be possible to see what bits of your information have been gathered, to know who has access to it, to know what it's being used for, or even to deny them the ability to make profit on this information. It's incredibly frustrating, as if any individual citizen were to do this sort of reconnaissance and data gathering on another citizen, it'd be called stalking, and people would have legal means to redress. But the fact that even those who have not agreed to the Facebook TOS are still profiled and sold and used for profit without the aforementioned persons' consent seems very wrong.

clydethefrog 10y ago

This also happened to me with Twitter. Had to use it for an experiment, used random data but they needed my phone number for verification. I used an old sim card I still had lying around and suddenly as suggestion all my high school friends popped up as suggestion. The only thing they needed to know was my number to figure out my entire social network because of my friends sharing their digital address book.