Yep, my two dummy accounts have email correspondence but no facebook connections as of yet. Then again, these things seem to take time. My teacher and father were only recommended to me a few months ago, when we’ve been in contact for longer.
>and they seem to be directed towards stuff that i have looked at on the internet the last few days…interesting???
Thats not facebook, thats actually a very old feature. Ad networks which display those ads can track across domains. You probably have several tracking cookies installed by these ads. If the same ad network runs ads on golf.com, it might assume you are a golfer, and later show you golf ads on a different site. If you click on an ad it will make other assumptions.
You may also have one or several spyware toolbars, applications, plugins, etc which contribute more information about your web visits.
If you run most anti-malware software it will detect tracking cookies and delete them. AVG does and so does Spybot. Once you remove these cookies you’ll stop getting targetted ads until it can build a new profile of your habits.
From their ad targeting policy:
Italics mine.
They also target by key words. Are there any references to golf in your profile? As for data recovery services, I see those from time to time and I don’t think I have ever searched for anything that would prompt an ad, so it might just be coincidence. They could have been there before but you’ve just now noticed them.
I’m just now looking at my FB ads and it looks like 100% of them are for match-making and hook-up sites. So I changed my relationship status from single to married and all the ads changed instantly to bingo, reality TV, a couples cruise and summer camp for the kids that I might now have.
Yes, FB is learning about you. But it has to do that in order to function properly as a social networking site.
I forgot to mention this. Facebook probably doens’t drive their own ads, they use advertising networks, and I work with them in other ways. Cookies on your machine let the ad servers know where you’ve been (and have tie ins with search engines as well) so they know where you’ve been surfing. It has little to do with Facebook, they just employ the ad service.
The software I work on personalizes those ads even further, based on your specific shopping product views and purchases. But anyone who uses the ad service gets the same functionality.
Some of the Facebook ads I’ve seen are specific to my college major, so they are using some information from my profile. I can’t get too upset, though; targeted advertising is a large part of what keeps the site free.
Quite possibly your aunt just had Facebook search through her contact list. That’s what happened to me…I had an aunt show up in my suggested list and it was because she had just joined Facebook and had let it process her webmail contacts as part of the process. So the actions of other people does affect your “People You May Know” list.
Hey! 2000th post! Woo!