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Comment by weavie | Hacker News Reader

Could it be the email address you signed up with was in their contact list?

It's probably an access point/ip based thing.

If you make a new friend(s) and visit them (before adding them on FB) and use their home wi-fi to access to FB, they will almost instantly appear on the "friend suggestions" list. I experienced this (and heard about from people I know) several times when I used to have a FB account.

Facebook can't know the MAC address of my router from my friend being here and using facebook. At MOST they could know my IP address, but everyone has Dynamic addresses nowadays and that's a useless data point.

Google _does_ know router's MAC addresses, because they mapped BSSIDs when doing streetview mapping.

Dynamic, yes. But in this situation 2 accounts have the same IP.

That would explain the list, but not the sorting.

What does the level of interactions refer to? (what kind of interaction)

Recent co-workers ahead of past ones, people I met recently ahead of those I met a longer time ago, family ahead of friends and other acquaintances.

I remember thinking: they definitely aggregated a lot of sources to get this list.

Could it be people who searched for you before you made your account? I've noticed something similar with a handful of people but always assumed they were people who searched for my name and couldn't find me at the time, so their search was put on hold until an account with the corresponding was created.

The people you interact with the most are probably also more likely to be the people that interact with each other. So FB can see everyone who has your email address in their list and then prioritize those people who are most connected with each other.

I am guessing, but it is quite amazing how freakily accurate simple statistics can be.

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