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When I lived in a shared house, Facebook learned about my relation to my housemates without my consent. I didn’t use a single Facebook product at the time and u
by caseyy 2y ago
When I lived in a shared house, Facebook learned about my relation to my housemates without my consent. I didn’t use a single Facebook product at the time and used a VPN on my devices. A few years later, when I signed up to Facebook, my ex-housemates were all “people I may know”.
I was wondering for a long time how it knew. I think it was because some of my ex-housemates shared their contacts with FB and it discovered us as a social group.
It is really an eye-opening experience to sign up to Facebook for the first time in recent years. It already knows so much about you and your interests. It’s as if there was already a profile with your name on it that they were building, without even approaching to ask for consent.
- techjamie 2y agoFacebook has done this for a long time. They're commonly referred to as shadow profiles. Profiles built up purely on information provided by other people's devices/tracking measures where the person in question doesn't directly have a Facebook account themselves.
- caseyy 2y agoWow, that is exactly what I suspected — https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-profiles-zuckerberg-congress-data-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-.... I only didn’t know what it was called. Thanks
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoI had an Android phone with Facebook integration in the camera app. It would ping Facebook every time you started it up. No doubt with all the permissions of the camera app, including GPS access. From there it's trivial to infer your associations.
- caseyy 2y agoThat is devious. I’m not sure if my phone did anything like that as it was an iPhone 6 at the time.