It popped up on the list of suggested friends that shows on the right hand side. It’s an old girlfriend who I haven’t seen in 6 or 7 years and am really not interested in seeing. Her profile is very basic, suggesting that she just joined. In fact the first thing in her recent activity list is “joined Facebook”.
Here’s the thing. We have no Facebook friends in common. In fact, she only has 3 friends, none of whom I know. She has not sent a friend request.
Email? I think that Facebook asks to see your address book - so if she still has your email, that’s one likely possibility (although I thought that FB generated friend requests from that - so could be off base).
I’ve never let them see my address book but it’s possible she showed them hers. That’s probably the explanation.
I don’t think FB generates actual friend requests from address books. As far as I know friend requests can only be generated explicitly by the user.
Now I may have to decide what to do if she sends a request. I already have one old girlfriend who’s a FB friend and who’s been making hints and who I do not want to hurt.
I’m not sure what the deal is with that, but I do know they keep suggesting my oldest son’s father as a friend and I wouldn’t spit on him if he were on fire and my mother whom I haven’t spoken to in years.
It’s creepier though when they tell me that I haven’t spoken to or I should get in touch with certain friends on my list that are dead. I know that they don’t know said friends are gone, but it’s creepy to have them suggest I contact them.
Why not add her to your block list? She’ll never even be able to see you have a profile and you won’t have to worry about the awkwardness of refusing a friend request.
If you went to the same college or high school and listed those schools on your profile (and she has as well), that could be it. It calculates from your birth year and makes a determination who may have been in your class, and makes suggestions accordingly.
One thing that freaked a buddy of mine out the other day: he was on Trip Advisor looking for resorts to stay at in Myrtle Beach. He did a search and one of the resorts came back with “Shark Sandwich has stayed at this resort.” Apparently TA links to FB, but I had no idea.
Not the same thing but one time on Twitter, it was recommended that I follow WeightWatchers. For a while there, I was a bit self conscious about having put on that holiday pound.
What she said. Blocking someone makes it look like you don’t exist on Facebook to that person. If she searches for you, your name won’t even appear in search results. You will definitely not be in her list of suggested friends. I suggest doing it ASAP before she realizes you already have a Facebook account.
That only works if she’s logged in, though, right? I’ve searched for myself on Google before and up popped my Facebook page, and there’s no way Facebook could have know to block a specific Google request as being associated with my Facebook account.
You can change your privacy settings so that anyone who is not your friend won’t be able to see that information. You have enough controls to prevent people you don’t want to see your information from seeing your information. A random stranger may be able to identify that you have an account, but that’s about it.
When I joined facebook (to find out what happened to an old school friend), almost the first thing I saw was a suggested friend. This suggested friend lived sort of vaguely near me, but nothing about her profile rang a bell at all. Still, every time I logged in, there was her profile as a suggested friend.
Finally, I e-mailed her to ask if we knew each other, and she responded that we didn’t as far as she knew. Then I thought to look at her list of friends, and saw some familiar names. Doper names. She’s another Doper! And I had not typed one single thing into facebook to indicate I was in any way connected with the Dope. How spooky is that?
I joined Facebook soley for my job search so I have an email with a domain I never use except for job searches. I get WEIRD, very WEIRD friend suggestions. I don’t have an email contact list with that email domain but it must be from the jobs I applied to.
I had a similarly uncomfortable thing happen on LinkedIn. It recommended both a (former) friend and her sister (?). There is nothing in m profile that should link us at all, and my address that I use with LinkedIn is one I created only for LinkedIn. There is no other connection. We knew each other 20 years ago, I don’t have my highschool or hometown listed. I assume they use third-party data from Facebook or something.
I got one of those suggestions on the right side that was a women we go camping with as part of a group every year. We have no mutual fb friends. We’re not really her friend and she doesn’t live nearby. It was weird.
It’s possible though that a friend of a friend is her friend so maybe they look many branches down the friend tree to suggest those.
I’m not sure it does a good calculation. For a while, I kept getting recommended high school seniors from my old school. The funny thing is, I finally buckled down and added a couple (whose brother and sister I knew), and then the requests stopped.
