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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

I've had the same experience. Register on LinkedIn, log in, "Would you like to connect with <screwed up relationship from years ago>?" We hadn't spoken in years or connected on any other site, I could only come up with one thing: she emailed me once. I bet she gave LinkedIn her email credentials to find connections. I hate that feature.

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I was thinking the exact same thing. It's funny that he wrote that entire post and never raised the possibility of OTHER people sharing their contacts with LinkedIn, and that may explain at least some of the "people you may know."

You're right, I hadn't thought about that. The first person that commented on the blog pointed it out. You're also right, however, that it only explains some of the suggestions they made. It still doesn't explain some of the others, and they still don't make any mention of that in their Help page explaining where they get the data from.

I always had the same hypothesis as to how they were able to find those random connections. Which is why I refuse to give any social network access to my email contact list. For my own privacy and for my contacts privacy.

Yeah this really highlighted to me the inherent danger of social computing - I can be as private as I want, but I'm only as private as my real life friends are about me. I don't have to upload my email contacts for third parties to find out all sorts of interesting things about who I talk to.

I actually avoid being in photos at parties and events these days thanks to this risk. Facial recognition creeps me the hell out, and no one can seem to stop putting squares and names around everyone's faces when they upload photos (what are you gaining by this????).

Gonna be fun times when everyone has Google Glass and that data leaks or, more likely, continues to be volunteered by others without my consent.

Yup. Read an article the other day that police cars in some US cities drives around continously scanning license plates with topmounted cameras. Given Moore's law, I suppose they will sooner or later have the computanional power to be able to expand that to realtime facial scanning too.

What confuses me is that I've had the correct contacts show up in Facebook for an email address no one else should know about.

It's probably just name, location, and interest matching. Especially if you have a fairly uncommon name.

It's using a different name; I don't think I have a location set; and the only similar interest would be League of Legends, since I created the account initially just to get the free promo.

The only thing I can think of is that it's matching IP addresses and concluding my two accounts are the same account.

Even when you log out of Facebook, it keeps some cookies around.It could be more than just IP address.

Different browser, too. :P

On the other hand, I'm not sure how well separated I kept those, so it could have been cookies linking the accounts. (I did this way back in 2010, so my memory is fuzzy.)

Now that's fascinating. Matching an IP address is a different thing than using information that a user has shared explicitly.

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