
Facebook Figured Out a Family Secret and Won't Tell Me How - grej
http://gizmodo.com/facebook-figured-out-my-family-secrets-and-it-wont-tel-1797696163
======
bhhaskin
The more data we give FaceBook, Google, Amazon the more powerful they become.
There is a good chance we don't even realize we are giving them data due to
agreements in place between companies. I can totally seeing Facebook buying
genetic data from 23&me, or family tree data from ancestry and using that to
recommend people.

~~~
X86BSD
That is why I will NOT do ancestry.com's DNA testing kit. I fear WHO will get
that information and WHAT they will do with it in the future. Maybe when I get
older an insurance company will deny me health coverage because I showed a
genetic marker for cancer or heart disease or ...

Let alone what government agencies may have access to this stuff.

I want to find out where I am from but not at the expense of privacy.

This stuff freaks me out and people are just like "la dee dah here is my DNA".
_blink_

~~~
Danihan
It's easy to get someone's DNA though. Strand of hair, etc.

~~~
saghm
I have trouble thinking that even the most monopolistic of companies today
would put in the effort to collect the DNA of literally everybody by finding
strands of hair or the like. If you you send it to them, though, that's
another story.

~~~
alphonsegaston
Google drove cars taking pictures of every street around the world and even
sent people with camera backpacks up mountains and the like.

It's not hard to imagine them doing something similar with DNA, beginning in
public spaces like restaurants and coffee shops, before pursuing further out
nodes on the graph.

~~~
petraeus
Streetview information is public, your dna is not, google would get sued out
into oblivion if they did this.

~~~
sratner
Aren't the hair strands and fingerprints you leave on public surfaces also
public, just like any part of your private property that happens to be visible
from the street?

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andrewhillman
FB buys a shitload of data to 'connect the world' but they don't have to
disclose sources unless related to serving ads. They obviously use data
sources to make both personal connections and targeted advertising work. While
I agree that FB shouldn't tell this user how they figured her family secrets
out, they really should let users opt out of all data sources with a button.
Currently, in order to opt out you need to go to the sources but nobody will
ever know _all_ the sources. This person didn't do much research. Perhaps,
rather than contact FB she should have spent time creating her recommended
list for a while then opted out from the data providers discussed
[https://www.facebook.com/help/494750870625830](https://www.facebook.com/help/494750870625830)
then she could have done a comparison. Opting out takes a lot of time and I
assume it takes a while for these systems to update the opt out information.

I strongly believe that when online companies have a lot of personal
information like FB they should not assume users will have a better overall
user experience if the service uses offline data that the user doesn't
explicitly authorize to be used in conjunction with their online
account/profile.

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markyuckerberg
Create an anonymous account on Twitter.

Use the tags #firstname #lastname #fb and add public personal details about
someone you know who works at Facebook.

Here is how:

1\. Go to LinkedIn and search for people who work at FB 2\. Go to Google and
find everything you can about the person (bonus points for finding some
embarrassing stuff) 3\. Go to Twitter and use the tags and post the info

If enough people do it, it will give the folks who work at FB a real taste of
what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such disconcerting
revelations.

But it gets better - you can now use the tags to find intimate personal
information about other people! Just search for folks who work at Facebook and
go and look them up on Twitter. If you don't find anything juicy, then why not
take a few minutes to add something? Since Mark himself has declared that we
live in the age where "privacy is over", I am sure everyone he would be
overjoyed to watch this unfold.

Besides, the aggregation of such information at a single place will allow us
to slice and dice the data in interesting ways. Maybe we can ask the very
smart fellas who work at FB to provide us some kind of open source tool to
mine that information. I even have a suggestion for the name of such a tool:
OpenDox

~~~
grzm
Regardless of how egregious Facebook's behavior, encouraging behavior that
increases exposure of people's personal details is not an appropriate
response. If you think it's wrong for Facebook to do it, it's just as wrong
for anyone else.

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DanBC
> such as when a psychiatrist told me that her patients were being recommended
> to one another, indirectly outing their medical issues.

Facebook keeps recommending to me (I'm over 45) a bunch of young women with
anorexia. It's creepy as fuck, and I hate it. They do this because I visit
different mental health hospitals.

It should be obvious: don't use hospitals as part of the recommendation
algorithm.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
How does FB know where you visit? Assuming you mean physically visit, not just
browse to their FB page.

~~~
rando444
Every page you visit that has a like button on it, facebook knows you've
visited that website.. porn, news, whatever.. they know what you're looking at
on the internet.

Even if you don't have a facebook account, you still get a cookie so they
follow you online and build a profile of your browsing habits.

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davidcollantes
She forgot about searches. If you search for someone, and browse to their
timeline (I am not sure how many times this needs to happen), you will
eventually be recommended to that person as "someone they might know,” and
vice versa.

~~~
Mtinie
Unless you read something in the article that I missed this wasn't the case.
The suggested person, Rebecca, appeared in her "people you might know" list
and she didn't dig in to figure out who it was until after that happened.

What isn't clear to me is if the investigation into the PYMK suggestions was
because of the appearance of Rebecca in Ms. Hill's list, or if she was
discovered as a suggestion during the course of an unrelated investigation
into how the PYMK suggestions list is generated. Owing to the types of
research-driven journalism I've come in across from her in the past, it was
probably the latter, but I didn't read anything that directly stated it (or if
it was, I missed it).

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codewithcheese
I think it's fairly obvious your father probably has a number in his phone of
your grandfather or one of the relatives and so does Rebecca so it joins the
dots.

~~~
icebraining
But how would Facebook know that, if her father doesn't use it?

~~~
rando444
Maybe her father has WhatsApp installed, or Instagram

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Vinnl
> “People don’t always like some of their PYMK suggestions, so one action
> people can take to control People You May Know is to ‘X’ out suggestions
> that they are uninterested in,” the spokesperson wrote via email.

...providing Facebook with one more datapoint. I tried to use Facebook while
limiting the amount of data it could gather, but quickly realised that it's
pretty much impossible.

My current strategy is to add somewhat random datapoints, like hitting random
keys and liking/attending those. Still, the results that come up that way are
still pre-sorted by Facebook, and there's still a lot of high-quality data I
provide Facebook with for them to deduct _a lot_. I guess it's just a simple
step to make their work more difficult, having to also incorporate that their
data might perhaps not be perfect.

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lithos
Someday we're going to get a WE/Lifetime thriller/suspense movie where
families in some dead end murder case find their suspect through the "people
you may know" feature, and are completely ignored by police "for reasons".

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Overtonwindow
I just assume if the Facebook app is on a phone it will use all resources -
microphone, camera, GPS, contacts, email, and other contents - to make
connections. It's all-pervasive and really inescapable.

~~~
finnh
_inescapable_ if you use Facebook. Pretty easy to escape otherwise.

~~~
SerLava
That's a myth. Facebook maintains detailed data profiles on non-users.

~~~
Digit-Al
Absolutely right! If you think you can avoid the tentacles of the beast, just
look up "facebook shadow profiles" and think again.

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peterwwillis
What do they mean they don't know how Facebook found out? Facebook imports
your contacts and then it uses a combination of data you give it and public
records data and it just builds linked lists it then walks.

    
    
       'John Porter': { records: '1215 Wash Ave,Akron,OH, 555-0001', siblings: 'James Porter' }
    
       'James Porter': { records: '1215 Wash Ave,Akron,OH, 555-8901, jamesp@gmail.com', contacts: '555-0001, 555-1234', spouse: 'Rebecca Porter' }
       
       'Rebecca Porter': { records: '1215 Wash Ave,Akron,OH, 555-1234, facebook.com/rebeccap, rebeccap@gmail.com', contacts: '555-8901' }
    
       'Jim Hill': { records: '9030 Stine Blvd,Miami,FL, 555-5678, jimh@gmail.com', contacts: '555-2345', children: 'Kashmir Hill' }
    
       'Kashmir Hill': { records: '9030 Stine Blvd,Miami,FL 555-2345, facebook.com/kashmirh, kashmirh@gmail.com', contacts: '555-5678' }
    

Because FP and JH are not on Facebook, we do not have the data connecting the
two, so we have to find a path between them with more data.

A very creepy link is possible. For years, companies like Facebook have been
compiling profiles on the habits of users browsing the web via tracking
cookies. Additional data is collected over time until they know virtually
everything about all kinds of people, even if they've never signed up for any
website ever. It is very possible that just by browsing the web randomly built
up Jim and James's profiles, and searching for the same funeral home created a
weak (but potential) connection, which could then be strengthened by mapping
other data between their mutual contacts.

But I suspect a simpler explanation exists:

 _" My father was adopted by a man whose last name was Hill, and he didn’t
find out about his biological father until adulthood. [...] A few years ago,
my father eventually did meet his biological father, along with two uncles and
an aunt, when they sought him out during a trip back to Ohio for his mother’s
funeral. [...] My father had met [Rebecca's] husband in person that one time,
after my grandmother’s funeral. They exchanged emails, and my father had his
number in his phone."_

So Kashmir's grandmother _died in Ohio_ , and her father _knew her_ , and _so
did his biological father_ , and _so did Rebecca 's husband_. If the
grandmother ever had a Facebook, and her son's and her son's father's phone
numbers, she would provide a link between Jim and James, and thus a path from
Kashmir to Rebecca. Rebecca might also have had Kashmir's grandmother's phone
number. If the grandmother and grandfather also were ever married, or lived at
the same address, public records could link them.

Regardless of the connection, if you add enough data from enough people over
time, even if they are 6 or 7 or 8 links away from each other, the connections
can be made, without even creepy tracking stuff.

(Apologies in advance for the huge post)

