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There were plenty of greybeards making claims about FB tracking etc, they just got written off as crackpots. The below link describes the history of some of FBs tracking and includes publicised examples from 2010 and 2011. To me it’s just that we believed FB back then when they claimed ‘it’s a bug’, ‘a limited number of users were affected’ or ‘we don’t don’t do that’.

https://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks...

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I created a fake account for testing a fix to a bug for my company. I used a fake email, fake name, fake location, etc. I used a photo of something I was given for graduation and a date of birth that was within 6 months of my real one.

They started recommending my friends from my high school. I went to a magnet school for my junior and senior years, and Facebook even recognized that. I graduated 10 years before I signed up. And the one piece I made sure I faked was the school I went to. I'm shy. If I wanted to communicate with someone I figured I'd add them myself.

Nothing magical to it. They had some other piece of data from someone else (or me from some other source) that matched up (the data was fake, but I had used it previously; I don't make that mistake anymore). But it showed me just how dedicated to getting all of this data they were.

Wow, thanks.

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