
Tell HN: Deeply creepy people you may know, suggested by Facebook. - hoodoof
So I&#x27;m on a dating site, chatting to a nice girl.  A few messages back and forth through their system.<p>There&#x27;s no identifying information in my profile. She has my first name and that&#x27;s all apart from my suburb, which is listed on the dating site. Also I don&#x27;t know anything about her except her first name and suburb.<p>Now I&#x27;m not a big Facebook user but I do check in from time to time.<p>So I log in to Facebook and click on the notifications and in the list of &quot;People you might know&quot; is this girl from the dating site, same photo, and her full name, which I didn&#x27;t know till this point - I only knew her first name. I&#x27;ve never searched for her, never tried to find her in Google or Facebook or anywhere else on the Internet.<p>So What The Fuck? I mean really, WHAT. THE. FUCK? Can I say WTF any louder?<p>How is this possible? And is it Facebook&#x27;s fault that this information is leaking?<p>I&#x27;ve had online stalkers before and somehow it looks like Facebook is making it super easy for them.<p>I really wish these goddam creepy &quot;people you might know&quot; suggestions were illegal because they are the scariest fucking using of technology next to the NSA. LinkedIn is probably worse.<p>Can someone explain how this happened?<p>If anyone from Facebook is here at HN, please explain how your company knows this information. Someone needs to explain how this is possible.
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rnovak
Have you not heard of the Facebook ad network? Are you under the impression
your dating site doesn't advertise?

"how is this possible?"? That's been obvious for a while now. They track you.
Everywhere. Same with google.

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narrowrail
Doesn't "everyone in IT/CS" use tools like Request Policy, uBlock Origin,
Privacy Badger, etc. or a good old-fashioned hosts file to prevent said
tracking? Not to mention VPN+Privoxy on a VPS?

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rnovak
Well, considering I'm in the IT/CS group and _I_ don't use those tools, the
idea that "everyone" uses them is demonstrably false.

Secondly, the fact that it's the most probable explanation of the link between
facebook/dating sites, and it hasn't been mentioned yet....clearly they're not
_that_ popular.

Finally, can people _stop_ thinking that the way _they_ use the internet is
the same way _everyone_ does? That's so far from reality it's not funny.

~~~
narrowrail
I do not believe everyone uses the internet like I do, but I have assumed many
people on HN do something similar. Considering the number of threads I've read
about such tools _on HN_ over the years, I don't think it is far fetched to
believe that many people on HN use these tools.

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sbank
Maybe this won't be a popular response, but what we do know is that Facebook
couldn't give a single fuck about your privacy or protecting your private
information. (Insofar as they "care" it is to protect their own interests.) It
is prudent to assume and expect that they will exploit you in any way
possible. So if you are so concerned, why are you even on Facebook?

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Mimu
I would guess she searched for you.

~~~
hoodoof
But HOW? All she knows is my first name and suburb, and I have a very common
first name.

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ProblemFactory
With a more complex search perhaps?

Facebook parses and actually works with queries such as "single [gender]
friends of friends of friends who live in [X] and like [Y]".

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Irishsteve
The person could have internet stalked you and viewed your FB profile. You
could have exchanged phone numbers and one of you is using the FB app which
uploads your contacts in the background.

IF this is the standard FB friend suggest then I don't believe its via their
ad network. So the above suggestions are more likely.

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dreamdu5t
It's happened to me as well. Facebook has unmasked the full identity of many
girls I've simply messaged through apps like Tinder or Happn. It's so
predictable I often check the suggested friends expecting to see people I've
been chatting with on other services.

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aforarnold
I had the same experience with facebook but in a different way, facebook
suggested my father and my uncle though I have completely different nick name.
No mutual friend what so ever. I still can not figure out how facebook
recommendation system found my dad and uncle!

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J_Darnley
How much do you value your privacy? Do you allow requests from Dating Site to
Facebook? Unless you explicitly value your privacy and take steps to ensure it
assume all webpages report back to Facebook, Google, Twitter.

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gus_massa
Did you sign to this site using Facebook?

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hoodoof
To the dating site? No. My user account is created via email.

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S4M
You didn't link your account on the dating site to your facebook account, but
maybe the girl did, so facebook knew that the girl was in touch with your
dating account, and somehow they had access to your dating profile which
includes your email, which they matched in their email database to get your
facebook account.

~~~
bro-stick
FB likely buys, sells and aggregates graph data from numerous other social
sites and applies deep learning in order to pre-stalk possible connections and
make other suggestions for users' "convenience."

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partisan
Wait, wait... You signed up for Facebook, used it, continue to use it, and
then got upset when they violated your privacy?

So What The Fuck? I mean really, WHAT. THE. FUCK? Can I say WTF any louder?

How is this possible?

