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3) is provably false by the product. Facebook can accurately suggest friends for you immediately after sign-up.
by oflannabhra 9y ago
3) is provably false by the product. Facebook can accurately suggest friends for you immediately after sign-up.
- notimetorelax 9y agoI believe they do this based on emails and phone numbers.
- Lionsion 9y agoIsn't the social graph they've built of nonusers from address books shared with them part of the "shadow profile"?
- jartelt 9y agoBuilding a system where you input an e-mail address and it spits out likely friends of that e-mail address isn't exactly the same as having pre-built "shadow profiles" for a bunch of e-mail addresses. With such a system it would be trivial to build a social graph for a person quickly after they sign up for facebook (and then suggest friends). But, doing so doesn't necessarily mean facebook had previously built out a social graph for that e-mail address and had a profile waiting for it in the shadows.
- oflannabhra 9y agoThey do. That is data that is stored and collected about me without my consent.
- onion2k 9y agoThe way it works is technically very straightforward. I might have have your number in my contacts list, and I give my contacts list to FB to find my friends. They store that number and if you ever sign up they recommend you follow me as we know each other. What's complicated about it is the ethics of what's happening. Should FB require permission from you to store data about you even though I gave it to them? Do I have permission to share your number with other people? Why isn't the contact information in my phone my data? This is an interesting problem.
- mattmanser 9y agoWe've had to think about this for GDPR. They are contact details that you're giving to a business to contact people. Your email provider needs them, your phone company needs it, your cloud contact manager does it, etc. I think it's not worth debating to start arguing that we can't use addresses and phone numbers to contact people. That's their whole point. It's when they're being gathered without informed consent it's a problem or if they get stored without explicit consent past the reasonable use you needed them for. If I click a button saying "look for my friends", was there a reasonable expectation that FB or LinkedIn or WhatsApp or whoever would then keep that data forever. FB will argue that obviously you wanted to keep on checking that list. But what about combining different people's list, processing the data in unexpected ways, actually clearly telling the user the list will be stored indefinitely, etc.
- onion2k 9y agoAnd further to that, what if FB doesn't store the information itself but does store a unique hash of it? They can still do all the data processing and yet claim to have no "personal data" at all. This is a deep, deep rabbit hole.
- notimetorelax 9y agoUnder GDPR simple hashing is not enough. You have to throw away the hashing salt (delink the hash from the profile) in order to be compliant. The whole point is exactly the result, you should not be able to map the profile to the data you have.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoExactly - they should have always discarded any data about non-members.