Facebook ?

[EGLITOM]

Dear all

i´ve never been on Facebook nor did i dare to do so, it has not interested me at all. I have never submitted any data to them.

Today i received an invitation from a friend of mine per email to join facebook
Within this invitation there was a part called "other people you may know on facebook". And there where a lot of people from this forum and some other people. All if which i had private email contact with.
But that on the other hand means that facebook is actually reading my emailaccounts to be able to do such recommandation. Otherwise how should they know that i´m in contact with this people.

Am i wrong ?

And if so, that does not sound legal to me

Opinions ?

TOM

 

[Jeff Hamilton]

If you know one person on Facebook you get their friends on your list as people you may know. If the person that Facebook requested you was somebody you worked with then a bunch of your work friends and their friends would show up. I don't think it uses your email to search for people you know.
Jeff Hamilton

 

[Ron Earp]

FB isn't doing anything illegal. They know they are under the gun with respect to privacy issues and as of late have been toeing the line with respect to being more transparent with privacy settings and rights. However, in the past a lot of the third party applications (Farmville, many others) used information from FB is ways that you might not have known about. In the end these situations weren't illegal, but users were not aware of some of what they authorized when they allowed some of these third party applications access to their FB info.

Jeff has it right. Someone you know on FB has requested you join. That person knows you and you happen to know some of that person's friends, so, when the invitation goes out it to you also lists some of that person's friends.

Now, if you join FB you can allow it access to your email address book from Gmail, Hotmail, or Outlook. It'll then scour those contacts and try and find more friends for you that are already on FB. However, that access is something that a user volunteers to FB.

 

[EGLITOM]

Thanks for the answers.

I know this friend´s friend thing from XING, but the friend who requested has nothing to do with all the other 6 people( of which are 5 of this forum and the 6th someone completely different, but again all 6 are private email contacts from me).

So still don´t get it how FB comes to recommand this people to me, without tapping my private email contacts.

Who knows an organisation who i could contact to find out more, this is to strange to me.
I´, not paranoid, but if that is the level of unsecurness in the web ( even if you behave as secure as you could when particiapting in open forums) i will think about what to do with my web activities in the future.

TOM

 

[Roark_John]

It is usually based off shared interests. Say I had a FB account, if I friended GT40s.com or ffcars.com or pistonheads.com, or had linked to a Twitter feed from one of these commercial FB accounts, then if any of my other FB friends had also done the same, when I send a friend request to a new person, odds are they are from the same background of interests.

It's not electronic voodoo or even data-mining your own comp, so much as it is advanced algorithmic learning bots noting your friends' interests and suggesting similar users based on that noted interest.

In other words, it is FB data mining your friend, based on their privacy choices and interactions...

 

[EGLITOM]

John

Thanks

Still my requesting friend has nothing to do with GT40s( yes i still have some friends with totally different interests) nor with my italien friend ( she is not interrested in Gt40´s at all.
I could understand it if the requesting friend is a GT40 nut and than all the others come up as reco, but this is defenitely not the case.
Again all the FB recos have in common is that they are part of my private email account.

tom

 

[Joe T]

Your not imagining this, it could be to do with the mail account or address that facebook used to send you the invite.

Their were quite a lot of instances like this, I myself have experienced it especially with Hotmail contacts being suggested as Friends.

If you can pin the group of friends down to one set of contacts in one mail account then you know that in some way Facebook has mined your contacts on that mail address.

Facebook can see my Hotmail contacts. How? | Facebook

 

[Randy V]

I won't have anything to do with Facebook or MySpace... Too many controversial troubles and life is complex enough.

There are a number of us on a more professionally related group called LinkedIn | Relationships Matter
... I also started a GT40 Enthusiast's group there although there is little activity.

 

[Keith]

Hey Tom, I only ever agreed to join one persons FB page to support a good cause. However, from time to time I get a similar message to yours and to my amazement I know nearly all of the people they suggest "might" be friends.

It dawned on me that the only way this bunch of people "might" know me is that quite clearly my email address is in their respective address books. Plus, as they were nearly all people I used to do business with I assume it's their email address book that's compromised, not mine, especially as I regularly dump my address book and start over for that very reason.

I just ignore them and refuse any contact or acknowledgement and never get any problems.

There has been so much trouble caused on Facebook in the UK you wouldn't believe. Whole families falling out with each other and so on. It's a bit like the gun debate. It's not Facebook that causes the problems it's the people using it.

Use "Social Networking" sites at your peril, but I would say it's quite good for certain kinds of businesses for awareness reasons in a business that needs to get regular messages out to a (youngish) customer base.

 

[Cliff Beer]

Facebook is essentially a "data mining" company...with a little social network widget parked on top of all the data mining tech. Basically, if a) the person who requested to be your friend on FB has b) FB friends who have revealed their contact lists to FB, and c) your email address also shows up in their contact lists, then d) FB will "relate" the email address provided to FB (your email address) by your FB requesting "friend" to the same email address (again, your email address) in their "friends" contacts list (noting that it is, in fact, the same exact email address) and suggest that you should be "friends" with these same people. So, FB doesn't have to actually "data mine" your email or your contact list, FB suggests a "friend" relationship based merely upon the commonalities and associations in the requesting "friends" FB network. This is an effective technique, and easily crosses beyond the obvious common subject matter interests, hence your requesting "friend" doesn't have to have anything to do with GT40's.

It's just plain devious if you ask me. It's not illegal in the US under the privacy laws here. However, I do know that Germany has some of the most protective/restrictive data privacy laws in the world, if the the most....much more protective/restrictive than in the US. So, it may be that while that sort of "suggested friend" technique is not illegal in the US it may well be illegal in Germany.

Ultimately, Facebook has one purpose - to make money. This is being accomplished by effectively building the largest mega-network in the world as a starting point (phase I), and then allowing the commercialization of that network (phase II). Every company of any size wants to know who you are, and what are your consumer buying patters for one single reason: to sell you something. Your personal data is valuable for this reason...and the deeper the data file is (lots of demographic data combined with buying patterns) the more it's worth. Scratch a little below the surface with any of these type of companies and you'll be shocked about the truth of how you and your personal data is being collected and "mined" for the sole purpose of selling you something.