Damnit, Facebook

[Zelpha]

Originally Posted by Skyl3r

There has been a lot of stuff surfacing recently about FB employees manually suppressing pro-conservative media and selecting pro-liberal media to be "trending." The story going 'round is that the "trending" topics are actually manually selected by FB employees and not trending because of the massive hype around them.

Not really related but interesting nonetheless.

Yup, seeing that in the news is what spurred me to air this semi-related grievance.

Originally Posted by Skyl3r

Back to the question at hand, yes it's weird that your almost-employer showed up. I'm more inclined to think it's due to something like same city + works at same place.

Well I do not have my place of work mentioned anywhere on facebook, and my almost-employer is in a different city. I'm telling you, there are no algorithms that could match us up. She popped up precisely a couple days after word of my employment might have made it through the company grapevine. Because last Thursday I mentioned to my new manager that I was briefly affiliated with the company in x city two years ago, and suddenly on Monday my former almost-manager popped up in fb.

Anyway I deleted the facebook app from my phone for now. I'm not worried about it, I'm just genuinely curious how facebook functions and if anyone knows if they may be up to more beyond algorithms & changing our privacy settings without users' consent.

[KittenSparkles]

This thread caught my attention because I've been toying with the idea of creating a super stripped down FB account just so I could participate in a couple of FB groups that some of my friends are on. I've never had a FB account.

All these things you are describing here are the exact reason I am super creeped out by FB.

If it was just a simple "have a profile and connect with the friends you choose," I could maybe deal with that. But finding connections to people in these random ways- uhhh.. no, I have no interest in that at all.

I still remember when I got Linked-in requests from an ex-boyfriend just because it mined his email address book and mine was still in there. That creeped me out.

I wonder if FB manages to use IP addresses or anything like that? I have multiple email accounts, but I was thinking that if I used one of them to sign up for FB, it would somehow figure out I had other ones too. It wouldn't surprise me if it did.

I realize I sound like a completely paranoid freak, but I guess when it comes to FB, I am.

[NMNan]

Originally Posted by Zelpha

Well I do not have my place of work mentioned anywhere on facebook, and my almost-employer is in a different city. I'm telling you, there are no algorithms that could match us up. She popped up precisely a couple days after word of my employment might have made it through the company grapevine. Because last Thursday I mentioned to my new manager that I was briefly affiliated with the company in x city two years ago, and suddenly on Monday my former almost-manager popped up in fb.

I can see two ways right here that FB could have made connections to your info. Not by mining your info, but by mining other people who have lax security settings:

"Word of my employment ... through the company grapevine" - any of those employees might have mentioned your name on FB especially if they do it at work. Your almost-former-manager could have picked it up and commented on it. That, combined with your geographical location could have triggered the connection.

New manager knows someone from briefly-affiliated company, and brings up your name in timeline conversation. ex: Hey, anybody know Zelpha? They used to work at .... and just got hired here"

Also, an even simpler connection would be if you use your primary email address for facebook and someone at the place of work also has it. There is an app in FB that you can select to allow them to rifle through your email. Not you, but someone else may have allowed that from their email, it found your email and *bingo* the connection.

Think "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"

[MissTerri]

I do think that it's very possible that people who search your name will pop up in your "suggested friends' List. I have thought this for awhile. I don't think that FB will ever admit it if it's true.

[Peregrine]

I promise you it is not. People REALLY need to not worry about this stuff. Everything FB gleans from you about you is purely done by these algorithms and association.
The reason FB is where they are now is because they do it better then anyone else.