So I deleted my old facebook account and several months later created a new one with an alias name. My email was new as well. I didn’t put any relevant information in my schools, college, profession, living location, etc. I never added any friends and I kept my profile closed to the public. Everything was fine until one day when I attempted to log in, facebook said they needed a valid cell phone to verify I was a real person. They would either call me or text me with a code to unlock my page so I could get on. I opted for a text and received my text message, used the code and logged in. Remember, I had friended NOBODY, had my privacy settings on full and used a brand new email for this facebook identity. As soon as I logged on, I received the surprise of my life! Facebook was recommending People I may Know on the right hand side, and it was ALL people I knew, including my mother! And there were over 10 suggestions, and they hit 100% of them!
I went in to my settings and Facebook had inserted my cell phone into the settings and defaulted it to let the whole world see that from my profile page. I immediately made it private, but now everytime I log in, I still get referred to people I know.
HOW IN THE WORLD CAN FACEBOOK MINE ALL OF THIS STRICTLY BASED ON MY CELL PHONE?
On my old facebook account, of course my mother was friended, but none of these other people were friends, even though I know them well.
It is possible to find out a surprising amount of information from just a phone number - your name and address (the billing address, at least) for example. Cross reference that with information already in the Facebook database and voila - they figure out who you are.
It’s based on the contacts list from other people’s cell phones that your in. I’d be willing to bet that anyone it’s suggesting you’re friend’s with have you (with the listed cell phone number) in their cell phone. If not directly, you’re probably just a few degrees of separation away from each other.
Just now I logged in and a brand new customer of mine shows up as a People you may know. Obviously they have my cell phone, but how does Facebook tie their facebook account together with their phone contacts?
Ahhhhh…I’m guessing you don’t have a smartphone with the facebook app.
Once you do that you contacts and facebook friends (as well as other social media contacts) are all one giant group. From there I imagine it’s trivial for any one of them to accessthe contacts on your phone.
Even if they weren’t in one giant pool, just having the app on your phone gives facebook access to pretty much everything in your phone.
As I once read, if you aren’t paying for facebook (which none of us are), then you aren’t the customer, you’re the product being sold.
In order to watch a not-safe-for-children video on youtube, you have to log into youtube with a google ID. To create a google ID, you have to give them an email address.
So I created a hotmail address, used that to get a google ID, logged in to watch my video. Later that day, I was reading a news article on a newspaper web site. I hit the button to email the article to a friend. Much to my surprise, the hotmail address was filled in as the “sender’s address” on the email screen.
My point is here that is wasn’t necessarily the phone number that they used. There appear to be cookies leaking information everywhere.
My suggestion if you want to create a private facebook account: Use a browser that you don’t normally use. If you usually use IE, use Firefox. Clear your cookies before you visit facebook.
Have you sent this customer e-mail? I don’t have any smart phone apps but that’s how Facebook usually finds my “people I may know” .
And Faceboook can’t take a hint…if I have 157 mutual friends with someone, over a dozen that are classified as family and I HAVEN’T friended this person, don’t you think there might be a REASON…mostly I’m tired of seeing them suggest that I “friend” my crazy ex-SIL…hell will freeze over first.
It is getting worse than this. You need to worry about super cookies, implemented as locally stored objects. These are visible between different browser instances, and different browsers, and are very difficult to kill off. Indeed some maintain multiple components in different parts of the your file system and are explicitly designed to respawn themselves if attempts are made to delete them. These are all techniques designed to allow you to be tracked and sold. There are tools for most browsers that help kill these off and manage the problem, but most people are unaware that there is anything untoward going on at all.
Super cookies and LSOs can get past private browsing. The browser still uses the same cache, plus Flash and Silverlight still use their own private caches and storage. The super cookies live in these places and even in private browsing mode sites can fish stuff they put in these places to track you. It is getting depressing just how much some sites want to know all about you.
Meh, I’ve been a user of Facebook since you needed a .edu address to register. So far, I don’t freak out at every privacy thing that gets mentioned in the news (though I do try to keep a casual eye on my settings) and I don’t get worried about Facebook figuring out who I might now (seems like a pretty simple algorithm).
So far, I haven’t been harmed in any way by it.
On the other hand, they have a throw away email address that no one else has for me and while they did at one point have my phone number, I don’t think they do anymore…or maybe they do and I just stopped pubilcally displaying it. Either way, I just don’t get that worked up over what amounts to getting some extra spam.
