I know I’m one of the few people my age not to have a real Facebook account. I’m making some changes in my life and I really don’t want to be contacted by some of the bad influences of my past, but my curiosity got the best of me so I joined under a fake name.
I used my mothers maiden name and two random initials.I did give my correct city, but left the rest of the profile blank. I looked around the site a little then left. I week or two later I came back to the the site and listed under people you my know was a distant relative I have only met four or five time and lives half way around the county.
This is a relative from my Dad’s side of the family her maiden name is the same as my real last name, but she would have no connection with anyone from my mothers side of the family. The two families live in diferent states and several hundred miles apart. How could they match the fake me to her ?
Someone you know added their email address list to Facebook and then you signed up under that email and it figured the rest out through its witchcraft.
That make sense, I guess I should have made a new email address. I’m glad I used that email, because the people I’m trying to avoid have my other email.
About a year ago my Facebook page wouldn’t let me log on for a few days. In the mean time I set up a fake page just so I could periodically check my wall. I was surprised at how many of my friends it suggested and even more surprised when some of my friends requested me as a friend. No picture, name only vaguely related to my own, no public info…but I did use one of my regular email addresses. I’m surprised facebook allows that. My email address on the fake page isn’t public. I’d think that you wouldn’t be able to search by something private. (I just checked, searching for that email address will, in fact, bring up my fake page). I know plenty of people that keep their facebook page a secret from certain other people (co-workers, certain family members, old friends), they tend to have only one public picture of someone other then themselves and fake name. But it doesn’t work if you can just search by their email.
Really? Given their track record, at this point I can’t imagine why anyone would be surprised if Facebook allowed cannibalistic rabies-infested werecreatures to feast on the remains of your shriveled carcass after they finished sucking your soul out through your anus with a jet turbine and a pair of rusty pliers.
Yep, someone else you know has your email address on their contacts list, your real name is probably associated with your email address on their contact list. Facebook users can allow FB to access the email contacts list on their home computers. Read up about Facebook Friend Finder.
Yep, happened to me. I signed up a few years ago with a fake name and never filled out any information or did anything on facebook, then I recently got an invite from my sister. I called to ask her how she found my fake account that had sat unused for a long time and she said she didn’t know it was me. Facebook had just told her she may be interested in adding me.
I set up a second facebook page , this one is not fake and has my real name and what not. Its use is strictly as a precaution against future employers using FB as a background check of sorts. Its role is mainly to provide a sanitized version of what I already have, with a few generic friends and so forth.
Now the question is , how do I rename the old page , so that my “real page” will show up in search , rather than the old page.
Go into your account settings, change the name, change the email, and change the Facebook URL if you gave it one. And set your privacy settings so only your friends can see you, etc.
You can change the Facebook URL? Then I might be okay with giving myself one for now. I thought they were permanent.
And I know people freak out about the email thing, but I don’t get it. The point of Facebook is to put yourself where other people can find you. That’s what social networking is. If you had no email and no name, how would people find you? How would you find other people? The whole thing just wouldn’t work.
Now, I really don’t get this. Why on earth would you add a ‘friend’ who you’ve never even heard of?? Presumably this is why some saddos end up with 400 ‘friends’.
It used to be that you only got to choose it once, but they relaxed the policy and now you can change it once after that.
As for freaking out, sometimes people only want to find people, not be found. It is possible, with care, to use fake info and connect only with a small circle of friends you already knew before without the rest of the world finding you (assuming your small circle doesn’t rat you out).
Sometimes people are connected because they’re friends of a friend, or they go to the same college and share the same interests, etc.
But yeah, sure, there are people who have Facebook friends they never really talk to.
My working theory is that some people collect Facebook “friends” just to show how popular they are. Which really defeats the idea of keeping track of what people you know have to say, because who the heck has time to wade through all the stuff that 500+ people post on Facebook? I can’t keep up with the 25 people I’m linked to.
And if you put them on ignore, then why are they on your friends list?
I for one don’t care at all about perceived popularity, but there are other reasons.
There are some people I only talk to once every few weeks (or even months), but Facebook is the easiest way to contact them.
Once in a while I might check their profile to see what they’re doing, but I’m not close enough to them to care about what they’re doing on a daily basis – so I remove them from my status updates.
For events, it’s nice to be able to send invitations out to X number of people without worrying about their latest email address, getting lost in their spam box, etc. Facebook also lets you see who’s RSVPed at any given time.
Last but not least, some people check their Facebook much more often than their email, and for that reason alone it can be worth it to keep them as a friend. It’s like asking “Why do you have 400 people in your email contact list?” Well, why not? It doesn’t cost you anything.
My main gripe is that Facebook doesn’t make it easy to separate “acquaintances” from “close friends”, but similar functionality can be achieved after some tinkering (using lists, privacy settings, etc.)
She’s not a facebook addict so I’m sure she just did it to see who I was. If I were a long lost friend, she would have been happy. If she didn’t know me, I would have been defriended, or whatever they call it.