How Facebook knows who you might be dating online
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
That's a straightforward conflict, but it makes me wonder why people are comfortable with revealing "all [their] information" publicly on facebook, when their dating network behaviour shows they don't want total strangers to know all this? Facebook provides lots of privacy controlls, allowing you to finely tune who sees what. If you don't want strangers to know your last name, or which area you're from, why make it publicly viewable on facebook?
Is the problem with facebook making it not simple enough to hide things from total strangers (i.e. people you have not friended)? Is it a problem with people never bothering to change default settings? Or is it something about the way people use facebook that makes this apparent inconsistency actually completely rational?
Hypothesis - if someone on facebook views your profile then facebook is more likely to suggest them as a friend. Increase the probability if the person is a low degree of separation from you.
Obviously people on dating apps are often going to be searching each other out on facebook to see more info.
I guessed this was how facebook did it because I saw an ex of mine once on the street (I don't have the fb app on my phone or anything like that - so I doubt it was using location data). We never spoke - but made eye contact. Later that day she appeared as a friend suggestion for the first time. My guess is that she viewed my profile out of curiosity.
There was someone I was meeting in real life but we had absolutely no FB connections. No mutual friends. And I didn't even know she was on Facebook.
Suddenly I saw her on my 'Suggested friends' list.
The only reasonable explanation is that she found me on Facebook and viewed my profile. Facebook saved the incident and suggested her to me as a friend.
Facebook forgets nothing. Nothing.
Several times I've been at a particular venue, without "checking in" or even posting. The next day, people I met at the venue would show up in my suggestions list.
Using rooted android you can make a seperate permission dialog pop up every time an app tries to access certain APIs.
Despite having all GPS related features of Facebook and its messenger disabled, the Facebook Messenger app tries to access my GPS location at seemingly random times.
This is troubling, and goes against the Play Store's terms and conditions for app developers. I suppose Facebook gets a pass on it through some unspoken agreement with Google, though.
Then I guess WhatsApp picked up that change and sent the data back to the Facebook servers. An hour later, the person showed up under Suggested Friends.
This. I had something similar happen a year or two ago; I enrolled in a course at a local university, and about midway through the semester Facebook suggested that I friend the instructor.
I was friends with no one else in the course, had never posted about the course on FB, or anything else that I could think of.
Of particular note was that his had all happened after I had to drop from the course due to health issues.
Export your Facebook data and check out they keep your message history with everyone forever.
Unfortunately they do not have chat logs from before 2011, when chat and messages were merged.
https://www.facebook.com/help/405183566203254
So if you delete it, it won't be in the download.
When you look someone up, there's a significant chance that you will appear in their "suggested friends".
Your Tinder/Grindr matches are people in your local area. Your Facebook social graph contains people in your local area, even ones you don't know, through your local friends. The chances of one or several Tinder matches eventually intersecting with your Facebook graph are significant. When this happens, people interpret it as a deliberate act, not just a coincidence.
If you use Tinder in an area which does not contain any of your friends, and people from that area subsequently show up, and have no connection to any of your friends, that would be a lot more suspicious.
> "What Facebook does and what Tinder does is go through your phone book, upload your phone book and does cross-correlation between your numbers and anyone else's number - and suggest people based on that," he explained.
That seems pretty clear. They grab your WHOLE address book, so there is an established link stored in their database(s) between you and every other person stored on your phone. From there, it's just a matter of graph traversal.
This is one of the reasons I decided I would stick with a dumb phone and why the mobile web (or using the web from phone or tablet) is so ripe for abuse.
If people knew how little information is needed to get started they would be either terrified or amazed.
First name + Location + Instagram profile and you are already off to a good start. And maybe there's a picture from some marathon you participated in, and they might have an online list of participants, narrow down to matching first names, then look them up on facebook.
What facebook then sees mimics person A trying to find his new friend person B, which makes it natural to include this person on the other "do you know list"
Facebook sends me phone notifications telling me they've found someone I might know. I get it if it was a new profile and they want the ball rolling, but I have over 900 friends on Facebook already, many I can barely remember where I've met. Why do I need more people I barely know?
What is it that makes Facebook think their app is more engaging if my friend list if full of people I barely know and never interact with?
Facebook App copies your matches phone book.
Facebook finds that your phone book contains your matches number and vice-versa.
Facebook suggests your match as a friend and vice-versa.
Nice and simple.
Google in particular creeped me out with this kind of "feature". A few years ago when I still used an Android phone, I changed jobs but didn't change the information in any of my social media profiles, nor in my contact card on the phone itself. After a few weeks, Google Now started giving me drive times to work at the new work address instead of the old one.
In fact, I'd say the only thing keeping me on a smartphone at all is playing Ingress, and my wife and I both are getting bored with it. Our local groups are also playing less and less.
I'd rightgraded to a feature phone, which often gets left off and/or at home. I recently picked up a WiFi-only tablet. For much use, that's as much connectivity as I need, though the ability to access a very small set of tools while in motion (mostly transit/navigation related) would be useful. There I could get a 4G LTE wireless hotspot, and the price for both devices and services is about right, but, as with the tablet itself, my concern is control. I'm fighting Samsung for who's boss of my tablet (have yet to root/re-ROM it), but for now, I most definately am not, and no, I'm not OK with that.
A hotspot would have to support very extensive /etc/host blocklisting -- I've grown quite fond of my laptop's 60k+ entries, and use of dnsmasq. Actually starting to look at what I'd have to do to build and configure my own device, though I'm not sure that'll happen.
Among other benefits, battery life for both phone and tablet is vastly better than what I'd previously had for smartphone alone. Phone'll last a week, tablet at least all day, heavy use.
As a side note, the fact that Google and Microsoft want people to use long SSID names to output is rather ridiculous. That really needs to be opt-in not not opt-out for any data collection.
The best way to handle the advent of this information is to treat your public facebook profile as public information and assume even the creepiest stalkeriest guy on the internet has access to it. Cause they do.
> Facebook goes through your phone book ... you give it permission to do this when you install the app.
This is 100% demonstrably false. It literally comes down to advertising/tracking.
Because tinder is ad-supported for the free app, they're sending data directly to advertising networks (of which Facebook is one), and that's being used to track you. Period.
On iPhones an app specifically has to ask for permission to read your contacts beforehand. There's nothing "implicit" about that, you literally have to agree it explicitly.
I really wish the COO at a Security research company wouldn't spew nonsense. And people wonder why the general public is misinformed as to the harm of advertisers/tracking.
I will also be going out of my way to spread as much FUD among my less tech savvy friends as I possibly can.
Go Zuck yourself, Mark.
I'm a casual Facebook user since like 2008, but I never even considered installing any of the Facebook apps on my phone.
You will still be tied to a unique identifier and tracked all over the web because your browser fingerprint (yes, it's probably unique: test here https://panopticlick.eff.org/) will be reported back for every site affiliated with an advertising network affiliated with Facebook.
I just tried it out. The site acknowledges it tested out ~6M devices so far. It's not that big of a number actually. My browser turned out to be unique even though I'm using a pretty common method (basically just run Chrome on an Android).
I've sent the version of Android (which was falsely detected because I upgraded to a newer version, but I'm still sending the info about the older version, so I'm assuming this is a bug), my Android model (and build) and my timezone. Anyone who bought the same model from my country (and possibly even the surrounding countries) would probably get the same fingerprint (unless he's using a different browser).