Gmail contacts popping up as Facebook 'People you may know'?

Hi, to prevent this happening, how on earth do I disconnect Facebook from Gmail ?

Thanks

Did you try logging out of Facebook?

Thanks, but that kind of defeats the object.

As much as I don’t want to see non-friends (with whom I have to correspond by email on other matters), I imagine they also don’t want to see me popping up as Facebook suggestions.

Bascially, I just want Facebook out of my Gmail account.

Change your Gmail password

Sounds good … done! Lets see …

Open a new Gmail account. Make sure it has no contacts. Turn off all the extra Google stuff like Google+. Change your Facebook account to this email address. Use this address for no other purpose.

If you use notifications, you can always forward this Gmail account to another Gmail account.

Hi Susan, that makes a whole lot of sense. Done all of it, fingers crossed. Thanks :slight_smile:

As far as I know, Facebook will only look at your gmail contacts if you have, at some point, given them permission to do that, and it is possible to rescind that permission again. (You might find that the “permissions” and “privacy settings” parts of FB are a bit less userfriendly and well-designed than the rest of the site, though. I’m sure that’s not deliberate at all.)

However, you need to take into account that even if you haven’t given Facebook that permission, maybe some of your contacts gave Facebook permission to look into their gmail address book, and when they do that, it is very possible that you will start receiving suggestions to add that person as a friend!

This happened to me when I signed up to FB. I run my own mailserver, so I know 100% certain that Facebook cannot access my contacts unless I enter my e-mail password into the FB website, which I most certainly didn’t do. However, immediately after signing up, it gave me several suggestions to ‘friend’ people whose gmail accounts I had communicated with. The most likely explanation is that these people had given their gmail account details to FB, and that is how FB knew that I was a contact of them. So then when I finally got my own FB account, it recognized my e-mail address and said “Hi! Here are some people you probably want to be friends with!”

This gets quite confusing and problematic if you use a Gmail account to interact with, say, therapy clients to confirm an appointment time. Everybody gets spooked about “Why is Facebook recommending my therapist/client as a friend!?”

That could get very embassassing … surpised to have not heard stories of Viagra clinic friends and stuff …