6 ms·

How is that possible for them to know your real age, logically? (I don't mean you're lying, but only you can work out the link with other services and facebook

How is that possible for them to know your real age, logically? (I don't mean you're lying, but only you can work out the link with other services and facebook that might be leaking this information).

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nxb 11y ago
- Deducing based on my median friends' ages. - Easily deducing my approximate age from my Linkedin profile. - Any of the numerous other private people data sources they have access to or have bought over the years. I'm sure my birthday and basic details are in some of those. It's impossible to get those all deleted once the information is out. - Day and month are easy, because everyone wishes me happy birthday in the messages and wall posts. All that's remaining is the year, which could be easily deduced from Linkedin and other third party data sources. - Which I've mostly cleaned up now, until Facebook exposed it all again. - I had a profile for a few months in 2005 before deleting it. Used a different computer, different location, different email and everything for this new one a decade later, but probably they've connected the identities. Looks like if you ever tell Facebook some private information, it's non-revokably theirs to expose to the world forever. Facebook invests very heavily in machine learning / AI, and uses it heavily through out their platform. They collect and buy tons of data both on the site and from third parties. This deduction is trivial for them. The bad part is not so much that they deduced these details about me though, it's that I specifically made it clear that I didn't want any age public, let alone the real age, and they exposed me anyway.
- grkvlt 11y ago
  I don't think Facebook are as clever as you imagine, and they certainly would never do something as crazy as trying to deduce your age based on median friends ages. But, if you do give Facebook information about yourself, then it's no longer private to only youurself - it's known to both of you. You will have agreed to some T&Cs about sharing it based on certain account settings when you signed up, so as I mentioned above, if you can prove information leakage when you've set certain privacy settings explicitly then this is absolutely a bug in Facebook's system, and you should definitely report it...
  - nxb 11y ago
    I can't begin to guess as to why you'd feel that way. Facebook runs one of the top machine learning research labs in the world. They're among the most clever in this domain, by every possible metric. They've written extensively about how they employ machine learning across their entire product line, and are adding more constantly. They've acquired numerous ML startups and world-class researchers. https://research.facebook.com/ https://research.facebook.com/ https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348 https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348 Respectfully, you're absolutely wrong, and I'm suspicious as to why you'd be intentionally spreading misinformation that they don't use ML/AI to fill in the gaps in their information about their users.
    - grkvlt 11y ago
      The ML activities at Facebook seem to be focussed on delivering content and advertising optimally to users. They can determinine which posts or adverts you might 'Like' based on your friends choices, or those of other similar groups of users found by various demographics and metadata. It's right there in the research group page you linked: > "We strive to find ways to deliver more engaging content in News Feed, rank search results more accurately, and present the most relevant ads possible." I think it'd be a pretty poor use of ML and AI to use it to try and guess the gaps in your profile, and then fill them in. Of course I'm sure they try and show you content and adverts based on what they believe your demographic profile might be, but these beliefs are purely internal to the algorithms that make the decisions as to what to publish - they aren't used to populate your public profile. In fact, Facebook want the profile information to come from you and for it to be as accurate as possible - to help those algorithms. It wouldn't be sensible or useful to just set your profile fields based on guesses, no matter how clever the ML behind it. As I said before, I think people ascribe too much intelligence to the way Facebook handles personal information - it isn't magic.
      - dhimes 11y ago
        I don't know if they are using ML or not, but they filled in my "works at" field with laughably wrong information. I didn't bother to correct it. It's not far-fetched to me that advertisers would be interested in this kind of information- ads to your SO when your birthday nears, etc.
anc84 11y ago
Facebook's apps have access to contact information. Someone who has her information in their phone allowed Facebook to suck it in. From then, matching a mail address or phone number or name (if the social graph matches) is trivial.
realusername 11y ago
For the day and month, they can deduce it from friends posts saying happy birthday every year, for the year, they can deduce it (mostly) from your school friends.
- grkvlt 11y ago
  That seems highly unlikely. I guess it's possible but it doesn't strike me as a good way of getting high-quality data, and in fact it would be easily gamed, and would have larege numbers of false positives. In general, I think most of the 'Facebook/Google have secretly stolen my personal data with intrusive sureveillance' anecdotes really are the result of someone clicking 'yes', 'yes', 'of course' without thinking when they first signed up, and giving access to their email addresss book or similar, then forgetting about it. They then get more privacy concious later, and suddenly wonder how all the information got there. And since they're privacy concious now they couldn't possibly have uploaded it, so it must be Facebook hacking them. I've yet to see an actual documented and acknowledged example of a company like Facebook or Google doing the sort of intrusive data mining and surveillance that people accuse them of without the user's permission being given. It always turns out to have been provided at some point previously in the relationship.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    Facebook is absolutely filling in your- or at least my- private information based on context. It has my employment incorrect- based on guesses it has made (I've never given it employment data). It's so far off it's laughable - so I leave it. I figure they expect that I will fix it.
    - xorcist 11y ago
      That's quite smart, in a devious way. You're probably much more likely to correct incorrect information than you are to fill out an empty form. I know I am.
  - teaneedz 11y ago
    There are plenty of documented examples of Facebook leaking data due to code changes, bugs, poor QA, or simply not thinking through the details. Good UX also should not fall back on, "We had your permission" when a company has such a historically poor (
smoe 11y ago
The easiest way to do it would be if one or more of your friends have your actual birthday stored in their contact list which the facebook app has access to (I think, haven't been using fb in quite a while).
m12k 11y ago
Most likely, a number of nxb's friends have Facebook integrated with the contacts list on their smartphone, and have nxb's birthday associated with their contact details there. Another option is if nxb's Facebook account has been connected to their Skype account (though from their FB-skeptic stance I find it unlikely they would make such a connection in the first place).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nxb 11y ago

- Deducing based on my median friends' ages. - Easily deducing my approximate age from my Linkedin profile. - Any of the numerous other private people data sources they have access to or have bought over the years. I'm sure my birthday and basic details are in some of those. It's impossible to get those all deleted once the information is out. - Day and month are easy, because everyone wishes me happy birthday in the messages and wall posts. All that's remaining is the year, which could be easily deduced from Linkedin and other third party data sources. - Which I've mostly cleaned up now, until Facebook exposed it all again. - I had a profile for a few months in 2005 before deleting it. Used a different computer, different location, different email and everything for this new one a decade later, but probably they've connected the identities. Looks like if you ever tell Facebook some private information, it's non-revokably theirs to expose to the world forever. Facebook invests very heavily in machine learning / AI, and uses it heavily through out their platform. They collect and buy tons of data both on the site and from third parties. This deduction is trivial for them. The bad part is not so much that they deduced these details about me though, it's that I specifically made it clear that I didn't want any age public, let alone the real age, and they exposed me anyway.

grkvlt 11y ago
I don't think Facebook are as clever as you imagine, and they certainly would never do something as crazy as trying to deduce your age based on median friends ages. But, if you do give Facebook information about yourself, then it's no longer private to only youurself - it's known to both of you. You will have agreed to some T&Cs about sharing it based on certain account settings when you signed up, so as I mentioned above, if you can prove information leakage when you've set certain privacy settings explicitly then this is absolutely a bug in Facebook's system, and you should definitely report it...
- nxb 11y ago
  I can't begin to guess as to why you'd feel that way. Facebook runs one of the top machine learning research labs in the world. They're among the most clever in this domain, by every possible metric. They've written extensively about how they employ machine learning across their entire product line, and are adding more constantly. They've acquired numerous ML startups and world-class researchers. https://research.facebook.com/ https://research.facebook.com/ https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348 https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348 Respectfully, you're absolutely wrong, and I'm suspicious as to why you'd be intentionally spreading misinformation that they don't use ML/AI to fill in the gaps in their information about their users.
  - grkvlt 11y ago
    The ML activities at Facebook seem to be focussed on delivering content and advertising optimally to users. They can determinine which posts or adverts you might 'Like' based on your friends choices, or those of other similar groups of users found by various demographics and metadata. It's right there in the research group page you linked: > "We strive to find ways to deliver more engaging content in News Feed, rank search results more accurately, and present the most relevant ads possible." I think it'd be a pretty poor use of ML and AI to use it to try and guess the gaps in your profile, and then fill them in. Of course I'm sure they try and show you content and adverts based on what they believe your demographic profile might be, but these beliefs are purely internal to the algorithms that make the decisions as to what to publish - they aren't used to populate your public profile. In fact, Facebook want the profile information to come from you and for it to be as accurate as possible - to help those algorithms. It wouldn't be sensible or useful to just set your profile fields based on guesses, no matter how clever the ML behind it. As I said before, I think people ascribe too much intelligence to the way Facebook handles personal information - it isn't magic.
    - dhimes 11y ago
      I don't know if they are using ML or not, but they filled in my "works at" field with laughably wrong information. I didn't bother to correct it. It's not far-fetched to me that advertisers would be interested in this kind of information- ads to your SO when your birthday nears, etc.

anc84 11y ago

Facebook's apps have access to contact information. Someone who has her information in their phone allowed Facebook to suck it in. From then, matching a mail address or phone number or name (if the social graph matches) is trivial.

realusername 11y ago

For the day and month, they can deduce it from friends posts saying happy birthday every year, for the year, they can deduce it (mostly) from your school friends.

grkvlt 11y ago
That seems highly unlikely. I guess it's possible but it doesn't strike me as a good way of getting high-quality data, and in fact it would be easily gamed, and would have larege numbers of false positives. In general, I think most of the 'Facebook/Google have secretly stolen my personal data with intrusive sureveillance' anecdotes really are the result of someone clicking 'yes', 'yes', 'of course' without thinking when they first signed up, and giving access to their email addresss book or similar, then forgetting about it. They then get more privacy concious later, and suddenly wonder how all the information got there. And since they're privacy concious now they couldn't possibly have uploaded it, so it must be Facebook hacking them. I've yet to see an actual documented and acknowledged example of a company like Facebook or Google doing the sort of intrusive data mining and surveillance that people accuse them of without the user's permission being given. It always turns out to have been provided at some point previously in the relationship.
- dhimes 11y ago
  Facebook is absolutely filling in your- or at least my- private information based on context. It has my employment incorrect- based on guesses it has made (I've never given it employment data). It's so far off it's laughable - so I leave it. I figure they expect that I will fix it.
  - xorcist 11y ago
    That's quite smart, in a devious way. You're probably much more likely to correct incorrect information than you are to fill out an empty form. I know I am.
- teaneedz 11y ago
  There are plenty of documented examples of Facebook leaking data due to code changes, bugs, poor QA, or simply not thinking through the details. Good UX also should not fall back on, "We had your permission" when a company has such a historically poor (

smoe 11y ago

The easiest way to do it would be if one or more of your friends have your actual birthday stored in their contact list which the facebook app has access to (I think, haven't been using fb in quite a while).

m12k 11y ago

Most likely, a number of nxb's friends have Facebook integrated with the contacts list on their smartphone, and have nxb's birthday associated with their contact details there. Another option is if nxb's Facebook account has been connected to their Skype account (though from their FB-skeptic stance I find it unlikely they would make such a connection in the first place).