9 ms·
It's worse than that. FB maintains "phantom accounts" for everybody whether you have a FB account or not. I've never had a FB account, but some years ago I got
by allears 5y ago
It's worse than that. FB maintains "phantom accounts" for everybody whether you have a FB account or not.
I've never had a FB account, but some years ago I got an email from FB listing a number of my friends and family and saying, "All these people have FB accounts. Wouldn't you like to join FB?"
The email included a reply option labeled "don't contact me again," which I chose and then replied. But a few months later I got the same invitation.
Needless to say, I found that to be deeply disturbing, and it confirmed my determination to never subscribe to FB. Later I learned about the phantom accounts. I'm sure FB maintains a dossier on me to this day.
- mrjin 5y agoBy clicking "don't contact me again" you were actually confirm that email managed to get to a valid mail box. What you should have done is really report it as junk to your email provider so that they can block it in the future.
- userbinator 5y agobut some years ago I got an email from FB I'm curious how it got your email -- and decided to use it. I have several publicly visible emails, and they've received plenty of spam, but none from FB like that.
- wackro 5y agoPeople allowing the app to access their contacts presumably. Contacts can contain email addresses as well as phone numbers.
- allears 5y agoI'm pretty sure FB accessed the contact lists of some of my friends. I've never installed the app or otherwise interacted with FB. I also know that one of my so-called "friends" posted a group picture with me in it, and labeled the people in the picture. At one point I did a search to see what information was out there about myself, and that picture popped up associated with my name. I guess that I'm just another casualty of the information age, in spite of my best efforts.
- nerdponx 5y agoI have resorted to actively asking people to not tag me in photos.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoWe reach. But with ML facial recognition I figure the jig is up.
- politician 5y agoThe jig is up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI
- vintermann 5y agoClearview is notable only for their brazenness. It's easy to code up face recognition these days if you have the data, and again, it's brazenness (in scraping) which is Clearview's main advantage here. In general, AI that's hawked at CEO types and police is mostly snake oil, inferior to what you can make yourself if you read hackernews and are willing to dive into Arxiv.
- dessant 5y agoThey do the same in WhatsApp, the app collects your personal data through your aquintances, and they hold your social graph even if you're not a WhatsApp user.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThere's a reason Facebook paid billions for an essentially free (and ad-free) chat app and chose to leave it that way.
- junon 5y agoI know someone that did the initial internal report to Apple about this years ago. This is exactly what it is. They use your contact data to create what are essentially graph nodes in a database, even if you've never signed up. Not sure how much of that has changed since then. But contact data is by far the most valuable mined from phones. Facebook is no exception.
- Jansen312 5y agoProbably FB has enough tech and data to recreate a virtual you as NPC in metaverse.
- politician 5y ago"'Login with Facebook' today to claim your NPC in the metaverse" /shivers
- rvense 5y agoDidn't LinkedIn once (ten years ago) ask for your email login credentials when you signed up? I know it suggested my ex-girlfriend as a connection when I opened my account, five years after we'd last talked.
- GauntletWizard 5y agoFrom your friends and family's phones, where they have a contact card for you, nicely labeled. There's a lot of data flowing around out there, and people overwhelmingly willingly hand it over. You'd think that there would be a law that, having collected that data, they would be required to hold it in confidence - Not for you, but as an agent of the friend who gave them that data. And there likely is, but good luck getting it enforced.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoas far as receiving the email, it may have been one of their friends sent an invite, but the list of people they likely knew probably left a bigger impression than "so and so wants you to join facebook" This is basically how LinkedIn grew their network - read your addressbook, put a "invite everyone you know" button in the on-boarding slideshow. Facebook just does the extra work of noticing your email in other people's address books, so they can tell you who your friends will be before you even sign up.
- allears 5y agoNope, it wasn't an "invite" from any friend. It was an email from FB itself. My understanding is that this was a short-lived campaign of theirs that was discontinued after they got some blowback. But I'm sure they still maintain a dossier on me.
- entityDev 5y agoDude, sometime around 2010-2014, FB was asking users for the email accounts of their friends 'to contact them on their behalf'. I may have the dates wrong, but I remember being pretty pissed at the time, as my so-called 'friends' were feeding them not only my email but other info as well through polls and stuff. . I never used FB at all - yet I was getting emails as described by author, but years ago when they pulled that BS. I'm on Facebook and linked to it without ever opting in, because of what my own friends/family/coworkers give them.
- southerntofu 5y agoFacebook doesn't scrap random websites for contact info. They used to rely on connecting to your Hotmail/Gmail account about a decade ago, and parsing contacts from people "stupid" enough to install FB app on their smartphone when such things started to spread. Facebook certainly knows my phone number although i've never had a Facebook account: that's completely fucked up.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- m463 5y ago
- seaman1921 5y ago> I have no idea if it's true. Please avoid such comments, they just add noise and distract everyone from the original discussion.
- southerntofu 5y agoThat comment was very relevant, although not 100% true. Facebook does (or at least did) incentivize people to post photos of users who don't have a photo yet, and to "identify" people even if they don't have an account. That's part of their phantom profiles exposed by Max Schrems and friends. To my knowledge, there is no monetary compensation involved (bounty) though.
- Crontab 5y agoI've always suspected that Google does something like this with everyone a person emails via Gmail. I don't this, it just sounds like something an advertising company would do.
- southerntofu 5y agoIs Facebook anything else than an advertisement company? I mean, apart from being a political police company working with intelligence services across the globe to crush dissent, obviously.
- tiahura 5y agoAnd? In free countries, I don't need your permission to remember who you are and facts about you.
- Biganon 5y agoThat's laughably incorrect. Whatever "free country" means, there are precise rules regarding the info you're allowed to keep and organize about me.
- oarabbus_ 5y agoI'd rather not take the side of the person you're responding to, but it's unclear what you mean. You can certainly keep and organize as much info about your neighbor or the president of the USA as you want.
- saddlerustle 5y agoFacebook does not maintain "accounts" on non-users in a meaningful way and they have stated this multiple times to multiple regulators [1]. An email campaign being sent to an intersection of a bunch of users's contacts is not evidence of "phantom accounts". [1] https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/06/final-responses-to-german-committees.pdf https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/06/fina...
- tw04 5y agoYou mean the Facebook that paid $4.9 Billion to protect their CEO from government scrutiny? The facebook that stated multiple times to multiple regulators that they would not use whatsapp user data for ad serving purposes.... and then they did it anyway? Pardon my skepticism if your only source of truth is "Facebook told regulators".
- saddlerustle 5y agoThe choice is between multiple regulatory investigations not actioning this specific issue over multiple years of the some of the most intense global scrutiny on a company in recent history verses believing somebody's tangentially related anecdote.
- kjellsbells 5y agoYou might be right or wrong, i dont know, bjt i can say with great certainty that a regulator doing nothing in the face of multiple credible accusations has no relationship to whether those accusations are true or not. Sometimes the regulator is overloaded/backlogged, sometimes they have been captured by the industry they regulate, sometimes there is pressure applied to not investigate, and do on. But it need not mean tbat there was no wrongdoing.
- msbarnett 5y ago> Facebook does not maintain "accounts" on non-users in a meaningful way and they have stated this multiple times to multiple regulators And surely they'd never mislead anybody regarding what data they keep. Which admittedly makes it a bit hard to explain how, despite having completely deleted my account several years ago (yes, not just deactivated, I went through all the little guilt-trip pleas not to delete), they managed to accidentally (a bug, presumably) send me a Friend Suggestion email several weeks ago (suggesting someone I actually do know, no less) considering that by their own words they should have wiped both that email address and the social graph associated with it several years earlier...
- heavyset_go 5y ago> The email included a reply option labeled "don't contact me again," which I chose and then replied. But a few months later I got the same invitation. All that clicking that link told Facebook is that you're a real person who reads their emails. It's like when you pick up the phone for a telemarketer, now they know they can continue bothering you because you're a real person and you answer your phone.
- alextheparrot 5y agoWonder if that’s a fake account creation edge using that, if that signal is interpreted that clearly. Setup a bunch of fake emails, upload your “contacts” to some compromised accounts, have them click on links in the emails to enroll in FB.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"Email verification." Tech companies prey on people's sense of good faith.
- idatum 5y agoOr worse, phone # for "security".
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoIt will not stop there. Expect to be asked to provide more "factors" in the future.
- rendaw 5y agoThat's a technique for avoiding criminals outside the reach of US law...
- yourapostasy 5y ago> It's like when you pick up the phone for a telemarketer, now they know they can continue bothering you because you're a real person and you answer your phone. The few times a telemarketer reaches through to me on one of my phones, I've put them off by asking in a niche foreign language in that nation whether they speak that language. Most of the time, they immediately hang up and I never hear from them again. Sometimes, they repeat their script, then hang up. I've never had someone respond in that language (that would be a blast to address).
- thehappypm 5y agoSo let’s say you run an e-commerce site. Someone adds a bunch of stuff to their cart. You want to remember this so that when they come back their cart is still filled in. Is that a “phantom account”?
- boardwaalk 5y agoNo. What are you getting at? Better to not be deliberately obscure about it.
- throwaway946513 5y agoThat's generally done with browser cookies. But not such a phantom account. Nowhere near the same.
- thehappypm 5y agoSo let’s say the company wants to save the cart, the user’s favorites, and their search preferences so when they come back it’s still there. A cookie isn’t a database. So they store that info in a DB using the cookie id as the index. Is that a phantom account? You’ve got rows in a DB for a user who never signed up.
- throwaway946513 5y agoGenerally when you want to save favorites, most, as far as I've used, storefronts require that you create an account before allowing those functions.
- thehappypm 5y agoYou can book a hotel room as a guest on many hotel sites
- throwJan22 5y agoFB is just another ad selling company. If you have an account it helps them know about you, if you dont have an account it makes sense they'll still have a profile for you.
- entityDev 5y agoFB wants to track all your networks, whether they are onsite or not. Once the databases via your email or other (Cell #) get shared amongst corporations, through agreements, buyouts, or 'hacked leaks' they get access to other info quite easily
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI wonder if one could successfully apply for a restraining order against Facebook's messaging, on the theory that it's harassment.
- Jansen312 5y agoDoable. But need $. It is restraining order not a lawsuit. It is harrassment basically if they send into your email inbox unwarranted. Same goes with robot calls, and it is hard to stop them not even with congress passing laws to deal with them. At this stage, we just have to ignore it. You might want to opt for text-based emails which wont trigger any html/css feedback to FB knowing you read it (maybe tutanota mail?)
- yeetaccount4 5y agoToo lazy to internet search, can you apply a restraining order to an organization?
- bobiny 5y agoMost emails have unsubscribe button, it’s easier that restraining order I think.
- Lio 5y agoOnly if that the person sending you email abids by the "unsubscribe" and doesn't just use it to confirm that you use this email address. I would lay money that Facebook just uses that unsubscribe as another data point.
- tjpnz 5y agoI've been receiving emails but of the joining as an employee variety. It started as LinkedIn recruiter spam which I ignored but then I discovered they had signed me up to one of their "working at Meta" newsletters. Not only creepy but a violation of LinkedIn's anti-spam policies.
- vintermann 5y agoLast time I got spam from an unwanted social media service (MyHeritage), I logged in, made sure to "unsubscribe" from all communication, and set the interface language to Chinese. Guess who gets "smart matches" spam in Chinese.
- bobiny 5y agoIt’s probably because your friends chose to sync contacts and your phone was number was there.
- musicale 5y ago> I'm sure FB maintains a dossier on me to this day. I almost read that as FBI dossier. Similar idea, though presumably for advertising purposes.