I don’t have the FB app on my phone or any other device. I do an organic search on my laptop, but never my phone. I do read emails on my Yahoo mail on my phone from people responding on FB. But the other day FB offered for my friendship, my tenants. Their #'s are in my phone and I only communicate with them by text or call. So WTF?
And yesterday my partner and I were using our laptops in the office. We share the wireless but our computers are not linked, unless of course it is by sharing the wireless-IDK. He had been looking at LOWES.com for something, and I was just checking mail. Later that evening, actually much later, I surfed over to FB, and boom, ads for LOWES.
Without ever giving them any permissions, has FB taken over?
- Did you give FB permission to look at your Contacts?
- You are both sharing the same IP address when on WiFi. As far as FB is concerned you are the indistinguishable when determining who looked at Lowes.
Your tenants may have been looking you up on Facebook and now Facebook is trying to hook you up.
That was why I never installed the app-too many permissions-so no, I don’t see how I gave it permission?
There are lots of ways Facebook connects people, and they are constantly analyzing Big Data to make connections. They have geographical info, IP addresses, and ridiculous amounts of meta data. It’s not surprising that they made a connection to someone you have an established relationship with. Is your phone number associated with your FB account for backup contact info? That could easily be enough - or your tenants have your name and phone # together on their phones and FB made a connection.
The bottom line is this is an important part of FB’s business strategy and they are very good at it. They have huge amounts of data and there’s essentially no cost to them for trying a friend suggestion.
I’m a Google user, but once decided to give Bing a try. When the screen came up, it displayed my photo from Facebook. I’ve never used Bing again.
When I first got my iPhone, it picked up phone numbers from my Facebook friends list and added them to my contact list. These are people I will never call, but I’m unable to delete them.
I use Facebook to stay in touch with relatives, but I despise FB’s total lack of respect for privacy and their ever-changing rules, never in the user’s favor. Yeah, I’m old and crotchety and like to control the distribution of my personal information. I suspect the younger crowd doesn’t care as much.
I never gave FB my phone #. Jeez, just so I can look at kitty pics. I dunno, maybe my tenants, I just try to keep that stuff separate.
Your tenants probably gave FB access to their email contacts.
Or just installed the FB phone app which is granted access to all sorts of things on your phone if you use it.
FB is a business that wants to make money. It does whatever it can do to make connections among its users to increase its revenue for itself and its shareholders.
As a FB user, you are only a commodity to them, a means to and end, and that end is money for FB.
You know, there are a lot of kitty pics on the internet that don’t require FB’s connivance at all. In plain fact, that’s what the internet is for. (Or porn, but we’ll just leave that aside for now.)
The fact that FB has somehow managed to put a part of the internet inside its walls annoys me, but that’s still a very small part and I can just write it off, as long as I stay safely and sanely away from FB.
Yahoo mail is garbage, BTW. Switch to Gmail ASAP.
(I hope you don’t also use Internet Explorer as a web browser. At work I see a high correlation between that and people who use Yahoo mail)
That’s exactly what happened. Either email or phone, it is tapping into your tenent’s information.
Well, that’s me, in two strokes. I once looked for a flexible ball-hone (to refinish a cylinder block), and now, every page I ever open has an add for one.
Can’t find an ad-blocker for this browser, or whatever I’m using.
Is there any way those people could call you on that phone? If so, I’m assuming you don’t want them calling you any more than you want to call them. In that case, you don’t want to delete their contact entries. Instead, keep those contacts so you can easily block or ignore them, or whatever.
This has the makings of a MY COUSIN VINNY-esque courtroom scene.
“So, tell me: what do you use the internet for?”
“Lookin’ at kitty pics, mostly.”
“And how old would you say the kitties in these pictures are?”
“I dunno; maybe five or six?”
“Mm-hmm. So, these kitties – they wearin’ any clothes?”
“What? No! That’s not what I’m into.”
“Right, you prefer pictures of kitties with no clothes on.”
“Uh, yeah; you could say that.”
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the prosecution rests.”
Dear og, only on the Dope.
So it seems Mrs. tenant just got a new phone, which and set FB so I guess that explains it. And yes, sadly I do use Yahoo mail, and despise it more everyday, but there is just so much there 
These people could call me if they wanted to, and I wouldn’t mind, but it will never happen. They are distant relatives, with whom I haven’t been in real contact for decades. Facebook is a good way to keep track of them, but I don’t want them cluttering up my phone contact list.
I just tried to block one of them on my phone, hoping it would make their entry disappear. Oddly, there was now a “delete” option. When I chose it, it deleted their phone number but left their undeleteable name in my phone list (without a phone number).
I do not like that my iPhone interacts with Facebook without my knowledge, permission, or control.
Go to Settings on your phone then scroll down to Facebook and click. You will see all of the things Facebook can interact with on your phone and you can shut them off. Including Contacts.
So, if you look somebody up on Facebook, you may show up in their suggestions? And then the person would have reason to suspect you were searching them? I thought searches were supposed to be private?*
I’m… not exactly obsessed, but maybe distracted would be a better word… by the things that come up in my “suggested friends” list on Facebook. How do they get there? The people I share “mutual friends” with, I understand. Even if we have one mutual friend, I’m not surprised when they show up as a suggestions.
But what about the ones with zero mutuals? Why the hell would Facebook think I’d want to be friends with this person? I click on these people’s profiles and start combing them for some data we might have in common.
Sometimes I can figure it out. Like one time, a co-worker gave me his phone number, and his wife (not him, his wife) showed up in my suggestions that very day. When I realized what happened, I immediately hunted down the setting to allow Facebook to access your phone’s contacts, and turned it off.
I wracked my brain trying to figure out how another complete stranger ended up in my suggestions, finally realizing it was somebody I’d emailed like FIVE YEARS AGO! What the hell?!?!? And I use gmail!!!
I’ve started doing little experiments. I found some random guy I was certain I had no connection to, and searched on his name three times a day for like a week. Now, no matter how often I clear my search history, his name autocompletes in my search suggestions every time I type his first initial into the search bar (although he doesn’t show up in my suggested friends, weirdly).
So, despite what they say, my search history really hasn’t “gone” anywhere, has it? It’s still there, somewhere on Facebook’s servers. I’m really curious about whether my name shows up in Random Guy’s friend suggestion/search bar as a result of my searching on his name so much. But I’m not going to find out, unless I contact the guy and ask him, which would be super weird.
I’ve actually been meaning to start a thread about this. Is there any published information about the algorithms Facebook uses to suggest friends and/or search terms to you?
*I am not a stalker. I’m… asking for a friend. Yeah, that’s it. A friend.