
Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How - nreece
http://gizmodo.com/facebook-figured-out-my-family-secrets-and-it-wont-tel-1797696163
======
will_brown
I have a Facebook account With literally zero friends (created only to create
business pages). On 08/05 I was randomly kidnapped at gunpoint when out of
town and wouldn't you know Facebook recommended friending my kidnapper (and
some of his family members). Because he took my iPad and connected it to wifi
he was located and arrested only 1 day later, before the friend suggestions,
but I'd love to know if sans iPad location I would have gotten the
recommendation from FB and been able to identify him that way.

Separately I'm getting all kinds of people from that town, I can only imagine
why, but it's pretty damn scary. And of course I have to wonder who I'm being
recommended to and/or my family is being recommended to.

~~~
mathrawka
"Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer" in real life, thanks to
FB.

------
aleem
Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic
facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline
beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking.

For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same
location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will need
to qualify the location is not a public restaurant to be sure its an intimate
gathering. The chances of you connecting with that person are then really
high. And if you are and the other person are in each others photos, then it's
almost a certainty you will end up connecting on FB should FB recommend the
connection. The more connected FB's network is, the more it can extrapolate
based on commonalities from the first degree graph of your network.

It's also the reason why Google is betting so heavy on photos and offering
free unlimited storage -- remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Google wants to build a social network graph based on location and facial
recognition to draw on proximity.

With AI this will get even more uncanny. For example a wedding will have a
certain photography profile (number of pics taken, the time of day, the
location and venue based on Google Maps or past photographing histroy, the
lighting in the photos, etc). Once you throw AI into the mix you realize
Google doesn't need to draw out any conclusions. It can throw all these
parameters into the AI engine and draw up proximity.

In this case, Google or FB will not be able to tell you how they drew the
connection, because even they won't know. All you can assume is the AI engine
will take dozens of parameters today and hundreds tomorrow. Google's deep
investment in AI infrastructure is a bigger testament to this.

~~~
mathattack
Profound. I don't think this explains the connection in the original post, but
everything else you say makes a lot of sense.

~~~
aleem
I thought that was fairly obvious.

As per the author's aritcle it is definitely not a direct connection. FB
relies heavily on first-degree connection analysis. If you and I end up in the
same phonebook (which the author mentions) or the same photograph and FB
connects us, we'll never know why. The not knowing why part makes it uncanny.

Facebook is to people what Google is to websites. It is in the business of
enriching its social graph in every way possible and then running profiling
algorithms on that graph. Google by contrast crawls and pageranks the crawled
graph.

FB has literally hundreds of data sources to enrich their social graph and
profile data.

A good start is their list of acquisitions [1] in the space of offline
applications, social networking aggregators, contact importers, photo
management, private conversations, travel recommendations, check-ins/status
updates, etc.

Then consider the FB partnerships with ride hailing services, retail apps,
music apps, etc.

Then consider it's own apps and features around events, calendering, photos
and instant messaging.

Also consider the state of technology in NLP, AI and image recognition.

Also consider the FB integrations with tens of thousands of apps for social
auth, share buttons and advertising.

Writing this post, I have surprised even myself as to how much data they have
access to.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook)

------
jpalomaki
There's at least a theoretical possibility that even Facebook does not exactly
know why they make certain recommendations. This could be just a machine doing
all the work. All kinds of data goes in, predictions are made. Facebook users
give feedback by accepting/rejecting the recommendations and algorithms learn
and adjust accordingly.

~~~
cat199
And who builds this machine and how do they tune/debug/improve it?

Pretty sure any given computation could be traced, though it might take a bit
of work and need to be captured fairly quickly...

~~~
MiddleEndian
I've been to machine learning talks where the presenters freely admitted they
weren't exactly sure how what they made works.

Reminds me of this comic: [http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=2460#comic](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=2460#comic)

~~~
Buge
I was thinking this one [https://xkcd.com/1838/](https://xkcd.com/1838/)

~~~
MiddleEndian
Also a good one, which reminds me of devs saying it's really hard to write
tests for ML algorithms.

------
dayjah
I've just assumed this is through whatsapp. I've logged into whatsapp with my
phone number, fb know my phone number (2fa codes), and they've slurped my
address book from my phone and then show me connections on fb that are a few
degrees of separation. This is the only way I can think that neighbours I
barely know show up on the "people you may know" feature -- we're connected
through neighbours I know far better.

~~~
kylemclaren
You are 100% correct about this. People have appeared on "People you may know"
when I have absolutely zero connection to them other than I have chatted to
the on What's App... I'm afraid I may have to stop using the service soon...
was great until FB bought it.

~~~
javiramos
I agree - it is amazing how even a small mention of a product in a whatsapp
conversation with my friends turns into a barrage of related ads on Facebook.
We have even started teasing each other by mention funny products just to
indundate each other with irrelevant ads. So sad - my assumption is: anything
you say or do in an electronic device is NOT private.

~~~
bb101
I wonder how this could work when Whatsapp advertises that conversations are
encrypted end-to-end.

~~~
jpalomaki
These kinds of things might be just random. You see probably thousands of ads
during the day, but most of them are not registered by your conscious mind.
Only when there is a notable connection to something, your brain wakes up and
you register the ad.

There's also the option that before bringing up something in conversation,
your friend has made some related searches or reacted to a related ad.
Facebook could then make the decision to show the ad to you based on your
friend past behavior and the fact that you two had a conversation.

~~~
riteshpatel
> These kinds of things might be just random. You see probably thousands of
> ads during the day, but most of them are not registered by your conscious
> mind. Only when there is a notable connection to something, your brain wakes
> up and you register the ad.

This is similar to the Cocktail Party Effect

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect)

------
phkahler
I would imagine Facebook keeps placeholders for people you know that are not
on Facebook. His father had made a contact with one of the relatives not on FB
but with the other name. Perhaps the great aunt had him in her contacts as
well. A name and/or phone number can represent a person in the graph without
being a FB user. Why they made a suggestion so many degrees away is a little
curious, but I think they mix those in with the more obvious ones just to
check.

TL;DR: I think their graph includes non-FB-using people.

~~~
glenstein
If non-FB/shadow profiles can be derived from phone numbers, or assumed
relationships (e.g. "this person probably has parents"), might they also be
derived from the contents of private messages?

------
kuschku
And this is why under German law the BDSG §34 exists, which allows every
citizen to request, once every 12 months, for free, from every company a list
of all data the company has on the citizen, how they got it, whom they gave it
to, and all statistical models that were derived from the data, or that had an
influence on the data.

It’d be interesting to make a BDSG §34 request about "People you may know",
just to see how Facebook responds (and if you have to pull them through court)

~~~
jerf
If a German HN reader would be so kind as to make that request and report back
on what they get, I can absolutely positively guarantee that they will be the
happy recipient of One Internet Point from me when they submit the story to
HN.

~~~
thg
You get a CD with every conversation you ever had, every picture you uploaded,
everything you shared on that wall. "Deleted" or not, it's on there. Pretty
much every interaction you ever had while browsing Facebook.

Nothing about your shadow profile, though.

------
nebabyte
> It was not a very convincing excuse. Facebook gets people to hand over
> information about themselves all the time; by what principle would it be
> unreasonable to sometimes hand some of that information back?

You are not "handing" them anything with an expectation of reciprocity, you
(in most cases) willingly give up information about yourself to them in
exchange for their free service. They don't need an "excuse" \- you were as
free to say "no" as they are to you.

I agree that in cases where others give up information about people they know
there's no consent from the person (necessarily) but even that is between the
person and their peers. There are people in my life who I don't share
information with because I know how fast that information will spread if they
know it; the kind of privacy etiquette required to respect people's privacy
wishes will likely become more commonplace as it's made clear indexing
organizations only know what people tell them.

I've been against facebook for some time yet even I don't agree with writers
of sensationalist pieces like this. You have what's coming to you when you use
third party services like facebook then complain about the imbalance of power
they imply. Turns out the reason people who adamantly don't use those services
do so other than just 'hipsterism' or whatever you thought were their reasons.

~~~
codemac
> _You are not "handing" them anything with an expectation of reciprocity, you
> (in most cases) willingly give up information about yourself to them in
> exchange for their free service. They don't need an "excuse" \- you were as
> free to say "no" as they are to you._

You are not free to say no to facebook.

You do not hand your information to them, they take it. There's a reason they
buy information from "data brokers", and it's because it include information
you are not willingly giving to them.

~~~
nebabyte
> You are not free to say no to facebook.

Funny, that's exactly what I and many others did/do.

~~~
codemac
How?

Seriously, would love to know. They keep a profile for any person that they
think a facebook member knows, so how do I stop them from creating that
profile?

------
decentralised
I haven't used my Facebook account in years, ever since they recommended I
connected with a person I'd known for 20+ years but with whom I shared no
connections or commonalities apart from our nationality. As I remember it,
neither of us had listed schools, jobs or interests in our profiles.

Maybe it was a coincidence but it made me very anxious so I left the platform.

~~~
agotterer
It's possible that one of you connected Facebook to a service along the way
that provided access to contact information like email or phone number and
they used that to make the connection.

~~~
decentralised
Could be, but by and large I've always been a late adopter of social media so
apart from a hotmail / messenger account, I think FB was the only common
service.

------
Havoc
It definitely hooked into Whatsapp. Was chatting to a girl from tinder on
there didn't even have last name...next day FB suggested her.

Although on second thoughts that might be via FB messenger app having access
to contacts. Either way it figures out the person via the phone number.

------
haffi112
Or it is just a chance event? As it is not a controlled experiment and the
story concerns a single individual I find the conclusion to be rather shaky.

~~~
maxerickson
There are roughly 300 million people in the US. A given person has, let's say,
~10,000 tenuous connections.

How often would a random selection of 1000 people from the 300 million be
expected to intersect with the 10,000?

~~~
devilsavocado
Napkin math: For just 1 person to intersect: Each of those 10000 people have a
(10000/30000000)/100 % chance to get selected, or .00000033%. Multiply that by
a thousand selections = 0.00033% chance. Those selections are refreshed maybe
100 times a year so 0.033% chance per year.

There are billions of facebook users, so this should be happening all the time
by pure chance. But of course it's not pure chance. Facebook will be selecting
from a pool much much smaller than 300 million, and the selections won't be
random.

------
JulienSchmidt
Likely she searched for the name "porter" at some point suggesting that she is
interested in people with that name.

Combined with 2nd and 3rd degree phone and email connections that might be a
strong indicator for FBs algorithm.

~~~
takeda
Yep, the article totally ignores it. The fact that she immediately said that
they are related, makes me believe she was looking at his profile earlier, and
FB just picked up on it.

------
mcguire
" _What information had Facebook used, then? The company would not tell me
what triggered this recommendation, citing privacy reasons._ "

Their privacy, not yours.

------
superobserver
Facebook is a monolithic threat by inducing the world into accepting the
relinquishment of privacy for convenience. The abiding thought that all should
remember is it is a marketing (ad) platform. Furthermore, given it limits
social outreach to 5000 "friends" (with no such limits on "follows", which
still prove difficult to utilize), it is assuredly not intended to facilitate
social outreach.

------
gcb0
facebook does nothing besides match tons of contact list that idiots upload to
their servers when they install any facebook app.

why does people think this is rocket science? even the supposedly clever
people here try to imagine complex algorithms. geez. its 1:1 text match on
phone numbers.

their genius move was getting enough idiots uploading their entire phone
address book for free.

~~~
micheljones
I do agree with your sentiment, but Facebook does a lot more than just that.

They put a lot of effort into tracking sites you browse, their phone app
slurps up any possible data to improve your profile, starting with location
info, and going all the way to uploading photos from your camera gallery to
Facebook, to be analyzed for face recognition.

------
oelmekki
Facebook is going way too far in many ways.

The other day, I had a couple of friends at my place. At some point, we
decided to order pizzas. We did so online, at my usual pizzeria. 30 minutes
later (not sure of the delay, but it was before pizzas were delivered), one of
my friend check her facebook on her mobile and see ... an ad for that
pizzeria. She said she's never seen the ad before, nor ever ordered at that
pizzeria.

The best I could guess about it would probably make use of phones gps,
detecting we were close and what I was doing on the net, through social share
buttons tracking. Anyway, that's outrageous. Facebook use of personal data is
that creepy thing we were all afraid Google would do. It really feels like
having a glass of wine in your sofa, and the telephone rings and someone
unknown says : "cheers!".

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Actually, it seems like much simpler than that.

Possible, but unlikely: the pizzeria was using a tracking pixel with a
purchase event and was targeting ads to friends of purchasers. I don't _think_
you can do this exact kind of targeting (but not sure) and it's pretty
sophisticated for some random pizza place.

By far the most likely scenario is a mix of coincidence and confirmation bias.
The pizzeria was just running geo and time of day ads and your friend did not
notice or remember until this event made it seem significant.

------
leo_mck
I see all kind of theories about the misterious nature of facebook
recommendations. I believe that they use all kind of complex things but most
of those unexpected recommendations could be explained by assuming that
facebook recommend you people that have being cheking you out. If you saw
someone on the street and that person check your facebook, they are
recommended to you and it looks like magic because you did nothing. I do not
know if this is the case but it is simple and seems to explain a lot of those
strange recommendations.

------
altern8tif
Not entirely relevant to the original story, but Facebook does use machine
learning to identify faces as well (similar technology to how Google or Apple
uses in their Photo apps).

So even if you've never been tagged in a photo or checked into a location,
there is a possibility that just by appearing in a random stranger's Facebook
photo, they would be able to place you in the vicinity of said stranger at a
particular time, and make more conclusions/connections from there.

------
notdang
I deleted my FB account 6 years ago. A couple of weeks ago I bought on Amazon
a kit to connect the dish-washing machine (I have uBlock and Ghostery).

I told my wife about the purchase and 10 minutes later she sees the exact same
kit that I bought in her FB ads.

Does this mean that Amazon sells/shares this data or I am too paranoid?
However it's hard to believe in such a coincidence.

~~~
ec109685
Your credit card or email provider may sell data to Facebook.

------
gweinberg
Facebook once suggested I friend my dentist. We've never had any online
correspondence.

~~~
nickelbox
Does your dentist have free WiFi?

~~~
takeda
Ha! That's genius, using WiFi BSSID to find people who are in close proximity.

Actually one doesn't even need to sign in to it.

------
krallja
Well, if Facebook won't tell you how, you need to go figure out the connection
you have with the other N thousand people it recommended to you. You might be
able to find the common links, and do some valuable reporting in the process.

------
mathrawka
If you search for a person and look at their profile, you will show up on
their PYMK list.

I've noticed that, but not sure if the author of the article had it that way
as the other person said she didn't know her.

------
slightparanoid
If the facebook app can identify unique phones in your vicinity -- IE MAC
assesses, then it could form links without facebook being installed on the
middle devices.

------
monkeyprojects
And that is why I only have 1 friend on Facebook - my wife

~~~
Simon_says
Funnily enough, I'm not FB friends with my wife, and she never comes up on my
"People You May Know". I spend more time with her than anyone, so maybe FB's
algorithm isn't so great?

~~~
tyingq
Maybe she's clever?
[https://m.facebook.com/help/290450221052800/](https://m.facebook.com/help/290450221052800/)

~~~
Simon_says
Ha!

------
wdr1
Alice searches for Bob but does not add him.

Facebook shows Bob a suggestion to add Alice.

It doesn't explain all cases, but it does explain quite a few.

------
eveningcoffee
Perhaps they have acquired one of these heritage database websites?

------
whipoodle
So do we think Facebook and Amazon are just figuring out every relation
between things in the world and they'll work out how to monetize it later? Or,
what exactly is the hypothesis here? I have seen them accused of some pretty
impressive leaps of inference lately.

~~~
micheljones
Re: Amazon:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-
details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/)

~~~
whipoodle
Cool link.

------
dingo_bat
> I told the spokesperson that it might be in the search giant’s interest to
> be more transparent about how this feature works so that users are less
> creeped out by it.

Facebook is a "search giant" now?

------
josephjrobison
Perhaps it's well known in the HN circle, but essentially all FB users are
just free labor, helping give signals to the machine learning algorithm.

~~~
gaius
This is what ReCaptcha is too

------
celticninja
I'm getting a 404

This link seems to be working

[https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/facebook-figured-out-
my-f...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/facebook-figured-out-my-family-
secrets-and-it-wont-tell-me-how/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we updated the link from [https://www.gizmodo.com/2017/08/facebook-
figured-out-my-fami...](https://www.gizmodo.com/2017/08/facebook-figured-out-
my-family-secrets-and-it-wont-tell-me-how/) but kept the .com site.

------
Cozumel
Working link [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/facebook-figured-out-
my-f...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/facebook-figured-out-my-family-
secrets-and-it-wont-tell-me-how/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks, updated!

------
dredmorbius
The history of Jews in the Netherlands during the Nazi Holocaust, many of whom
were identified through census records, comes to mind.

[https://ww2gravestone.com/holocaust-in-the-
netherlands/](https://ww2gravestone.com/holocaust-in-the-netherlands/)

For contemporary instances, consider that the present U.S. administration
openly supports racist, neo-Nazi, White Supremecist, and similar
organisations. Social-graph association of undocumented immigrants, Muslims,
gang- (or non-gang-) members, or similar inferences, all come readily to mind.

~~~
boomboomsubban
There already is a US example. Virginia instituted a "one-drop" law in the
20's and scoured through old census records to label many mixed race people as
black, subjecting then to Jim Crow laws.

~~~
dredmorbius
Do you have any idea if there were private records that were included in such
searches? Church or baptismal, or medical records, perhaps?

~~~
boomboomsubban
Private sources were fine, the memories of your grandparents could classify
someone's entire family as black.

------
throwaway209344
the answer is: what phone numbers you import from your contacts, and who
imports your phone number through there contacts.

whatsapp is just a lucky because you have to add a phone numbers to youre
phone's contacts to talk on whatsapp.

