Here’s the situation. A youth sends an email to the Gmail account of a local youth group, asking for information. An adult leader from the group responds to the email, using the group’s Gmail account and provides information. Youth comes to a couple of meetings.
Here’s the weirdness. The adult checks their personal Facebook account, and the youth shows up as a “maybe you know this person”.
How does Facebook know this adult emailed this kid, when it was through a third party email provider?
Does this link work for you?
I think there are lots of other possible/probable explanations.
If either of them, or a mutual contact, uses the FB app, their contacts all get uploaded and Facebook knows everyone you’ve ever called or emailed. https://m.facebook.com/help/355489824655936?wtsid=rdr_0zPFhZ4O3nVVqkwLV
It’s far from certain that the connection comes from this email exchange. Quite possibly, the youth is friends with other local people in their age bracket, and some of these peers might know the leader of the youth group. That way, Facebook might connect the dots between the two and suggest the group leader as a potential contact without ever knowing anything about the email correspondence.
No, it doesn’t. Seriously, the link doesn’t work because my work VPN blocks it.
I’ll check it at home, though!
@reply, I don’t think they have any mutual contacts, not including the leader’s personal email at least. Though… @schintte’s idea may have legs. This kid could have come up as a suggested friend in the past and the adult just skimmed past it because… random facebook kid, who cares? Now that the kid is known, the suggestion gets noticed.
If they’re both physically present at the meetings the GPS data will show that.
I think @Reply and @Telemark have it right. Facebook (the app) may have permission to access all kinds of info from one’s smartphone: contacts, location, nearby devices, calendar, camera, microphone, call logs, etc. Facebook’s job is to hoover as much of that data as possible from their users and identify connections, then nudge users to make those connections and increase engagement on their platform.
As an aside, if you are concerned about Facebook and other apps peeping in on your activity, you can shut that down on your phone by restricting permissions for some apps - on Android phones using the Permission Manager, for example.
They were probably both signed into Facebook and around each other. Happens to me all the time with people I work with and we have no mutual friends. Person passes by, later I see them in my suggestions. Most people are on all these apps all the time that are geo-targeted and use data across websites and apps. You search for something to buy, then you start seeing ads. You see a person, you start seeing them.
Yeah, @Telemark is right. I get Facebook notifications for my neighbor’s son all the time. Ever since the dad died and I went to the funeral and we were in the same room. Now whenever he visits next door I see him come up.
It’s also possible one or the other person looked them up on Facebook. Put those two things together and Facebook is even more insistent.