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Facebook can read emails and address books of your friends who might have your email address and it goes from there. Same thing happened to me. Most poeple on facebook are fine with sharing all their personal data with facebook - and that by extension includes you.

Essentially if any of your friends have emailed you or you emailed them, even once and only one of them it's trivial to rope in the rest.

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Is this common knowledge? Sounds like incredibly poor practice to sniff emails & address books without prior permission or at the very least, transparency.

They all ask for permission and most people just tick the box. Linkedin lets you do the same thing. People give them their passwords to their email accounts willingly. Looks to me it's a pretty common practice but I'm no expert on social websites. I wouldn't do it but that doesn't matter, there's always plenty of people who will.

its a "let uns look at your contacts so we will find other friends of yours on facebook"-feature. and a lot of people (sadly) dont care about this.

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