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Comment by jitbit | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar moment (and ironically I'm a musician too).

I went to a bar, where a band was playing on stage... After a while I realized I know the drummer. I played with him before, in another band, years ago. We had a beer, chatted a bit and went home.

Now, we hadn't posted any pictures, nor statuses, we have no mutual friends on facebook, no connection at all... Heck, Facebook DIDN'T EVEN EXIST when I last saw him.

The second I got home the app suggested him as a friend

Gosh this was scary.

(OP here)

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Not to say this is definitely what happened, but he could have looked you up on FB which might tip off the suggestions algorithm.

That's a whole other can of worms, of course.

Occam's razor, I agree. I've heard several times these kind of stories.

Facebook suggests a lot of people to me. Overwhelmingly they're people I don't recognize. Are you sure this isn't just confirmation bias making it seem like they're more successful than they really are? I'm not saying Facebook doesn't do some creepy things, but even at worst this is innocuous enough, and this has enough other really innocuous explanations that this would barely make me think twice.

80% of those people are the next-door neighbor of someone I was in marching band with 30 years ago.

I used to play a phone game and utilized mock locations for area specific content. Later, Facebook would suggest friends from the specific location I had spoofed, despite having never once set foot there or having ever known anyone from the area.

Myself and someone I just met were suggested as friends to each other after we met. Neither looked up the other. Neither created any contacts in our phone. Only possibility is our FB app knew we were both in the same place at the same time for a few hours.

now that is creepy

I stopped using Facebook completely when it suggested that I friend a Work Associate that I have only dealt with once via email. The creepiest part of it was that I have never told Facebook where I work at all.

All the other people that it suggests that I friend where I have no idea who they are, I wonder where the association came from...

I also had this recently too. I got given a friend suggestion of someone I haven't seen in twenty years. We have no shared FB friends, nor location, nor schooling / college education.

I have her email address in my contacts which has been shared with WhatsApp.

Curiously, there should be no way to directly link my FB account with WhatsApp. I haven't shared my mobile number with FB, and I haven't shared my FB account email address with WhatsApp. Somehow they have tied the two together.

I've never installed any other FB app on my phone, and my FB account is only a month old.

I found that particularly chilling. The friend suggestion doesn't have my email address nor mobile number, and we live in different countries. I'd love to figure out how they did it. I even use a pseudonym on FB.

That's simple - whenever any of your personal or business contacts grants access to their contact list to some app, "everyone in the world" obtains a mapping between your mobile phone number (that they had), your full name and nicknames (that they entered manually) and likely your other identities as well (e.g. emails, various IM providers, etc) that they linked to you in their contact list.

It's the same with facial recognition - to avoid it, it's not enough to never post your pictures, you'd also need to ensure that noone who knows you would ever tag you in some picture they have.

Another musician here: One day I got ads for Waves Plugins. I still haven't figured out how they have learnt about me being into producing. My FB friends are (afaik) non-musicians from school days and I don't open FB in my regular browser. Furthermore, I block almost anything µblock has to offer in my normal browser. Maybe they derived something from my e-mail address. Pretty scary stuff!

I don't think it's impossible for them to see your financial (Credit Card?) records and use that too? Advertising companies are after all, advertising companies... They get anything they can, even the old way of finding things out. I used to buy cigars online, to this day I still get mail from websites / companies I never bought cigars from.

Two potential causes:

1. Location matching - both your apps detected you in the same place for an extended period of time. Maybe you guys had mutual friends in the music community?

2. Microphone[0]. They have since refuted that claim[1], but I've had way too many coincidences and I'm choosing to keep my tin-foil hat on... :/

[0] www.geek.com/apps/facebook-app-now-listens-and-records-audio-when-you-post-updates-from-your-phone-1595873/

[1]http://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-pho...

Isnt this just location based matching?

But I didn't touch my phone that night... I'm not sure what happened exactly, the fact is - it made me super uncomfortable.

It looks like Facebook asks for Location: Always on iOS. (I've got mine set to Never.) I wonder if they feed this back to the servers.

I presume you didn't post anything about the "event" to facebook (I've seen "Person is going to attend Blah" posts before) or "check in".

I had once looked up someone I knew from college on Facebook, and their name appeared immediately, weeks later I realized they were trying to find me before I was trying to find them! The other person probably looked you up, and other factors pushed Facebook to suggest them.

If they looked you up that could be part of the why and how. Facebook knew where you both were, and the fact they looked you up initiated this. Totally creepy either way.

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