This is one of the many dark patterns that Facebook uses. It simply does not respect any boundaries the user might wish to have in place...<p>Install it on your phone? Anyone you have in your phone's address book gets to see your picture under "people you may know".<p>Someone in your family joins Facebook and friends you? Now everyone you are friends with gets prompted about whether or not they know your family member.<p>Want to delete some pictures you uploaded to Facebook? It's extremely difficult and they must be deleted one by one.<p>Other than LinkedIn, I'd say FB is the prime innovator of UI dark patterns that exploit users' unwitting behavior for profit.<p>The youngest generation of internet users gets this which is why they largely do not use Facebook. Soon they will realize that IG and Whatsapp are connected, and will avoid those too.<p>What's interesting to me is that the recommendations are fundamentally not useful. It's easy to look someone up by searching for their name without the privacy-invading helpful suggestions.
TLDR#1: The investigation still didn't reveal exactly how this happened.<p>TLDR#2: The recommendation to "prevent" these issues on the individuals side is, "Lisa’s medical community has started recommending that patients concerned about privacy not log into Facebook or other social media accounts at medical offices, or even leave their phones in their cars during appointments. "<p>This is about as practical as recommending people just figure out how to fly and occasionally levitate into the upper atmosphere to go out of the cell tower's range, move a few kilometers west, and then fly back down to earth to scramble all these tracking algorithms.
So, I deactivated my account maybe 6 months ago, and uninstalled the app long ago. Since then, I moved halfway across the country and, using a <i>brand new</i> laptop, a fake name and number, and a throwaway email address, created another profile so I could use their API.<p>People You May Know still had old high school friends, my old real estate broker (??), and someone I starred on GitHub. I have <i>absolutely no idea</i> how they connected that account to my old one, considering Google Mail is the only other service I've used on that laptop.
The phonebook hypothesis seems most plausible to me (especially considering that WhatsApp is owned by facebook). All those apps gaining access to a phonebook is a privacy disaster.
Note that everyone's favourite privacy-respecting app (mine too!), Signal, also does contacts-sharing, although it doesn't do friends discovery (so the server knows one's contacts, but one's contacts don't). If Open Whisper Systems wanted to be evil, though, they could do this form of analysis.<p>Back in March I laid out how they could use a private set intersection protocol to enable any pair of users to privately share their contacts: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223</a> (I'm not posting this to shame them or something: March wasn't that long ago for developing a feature like this, and of course it's open source; I could develop it myself and submit it to them).<p>I think it's something they care about; they've just not found a solution they're comfortable with yet.
I uninstalled the Facebook app from my phone when it kept trying to push Messenger on me. I only use the webclient these days.<p>This bolsters my resolve to keep that app off my phone. You know, it doesn't bother me too much to have companies like Google analyzing my email to send targeted ads because I assume that information is not going to get out to the public. Facebook is a different case because there's a bidirectional flow of private information. It is a HUGE privacy concern (especially as someone that will be a physician in a few years).
Amazed that this 'feature' hasn't been killed yet. At this stage of Facebook's maturity, everybody finished adding their real friends about five years ago, and suggesting non-friends with tenuous connections to the user serves only to remind everyone what a privacy disaster Facebook is and generate bad press.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."<p>Granted, that's Schmidt, rather than Zuckerberg. The attitude seems to be the same, though.
WhatsApp (now) shares data with Facebook. Now imagine if Facebook, Google, LinkedIn were also to share data with each other.<p>Imagine the possibilities [0]. What a wonderful world!<p>[0] If this were to come true, then the word "possibilities" would be replaced by "synergies" :)
This is a real problem. My sister is a legal clinic domestic violence attorney, and apparently there are concerns about DV clients unwittingly friending their legal clinic advisors, not realizing that by doing so they're outing themselves to their abusive partners.
> Facebook and the other companies in the Facebook family also may use information from us to improve your experiences within their services such as making product suggestions (for example, of friends or connections, or of interesting content) and showing relevant offers and ads.
[whatsaap privacy policy]<p>Many possibilities here:<p>1 - whatsapp connection with messages exchanged<p>2 - contact list loaded by whatsapp<p>3 - psychiatrist secretary number in whatsapp<p>4 - friends in common<p>5 - places in common
I think it's also quite likely that the psychiatrist's patients are searching for her profile just to checkout how's her personal life on FB which might give FB some clue as these people might know each other hence a friend suggestion. I do that sometimes to see some of my not-so-close friends.
That's why I am getting more and more reluctant to share anything. It's starting to be impossible to predict how your data will be used and what is private and what isn't.
I wonder if there is an open WiFi access point in the vicinity. I noticed that I had several coworkers suggested as friends shortly after I connected my phone to the office WiFi.<p>It makes sense that people using the same access point or connecting to Facebook from the same external IP would likely know each other.
Actually <i>wayyy before</i> WhatsApp announced [0] that they were going to share data with Facebook, Facebook had already started suggesting me to add friends. These are people whom I have no mutual friends with, but after more suggestions popped up, I realized they were all people I added to my address book and contacted before on WhatsApp.<p>I definitely did not consent to sharing my address book contacts with Facebook, and frankly nor would I want to. Now WhatsApp is offering an "opt-out" option, but I'm not sure how that will help. Isn't it a little too late for that now?<p>[0]: <a href="https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000627/Looking-ahead-for-WhatsApp" rel="nofollow">https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000627/Looking-ahead-for-WhatsAp...</a>
The funny thing is that this would be very easy for Facebook to fix - just a line of text under each friend request explaining the suggestion:<p><pre><code> * "You're both friends of Duffman McPartyDude"
* "We found Psycho Ex Boss's phone number in your contacts"
* "Location Services confirms you were both frequenting a dubious drinking establishment at 4am three Saturdays ago"
</code></pre>
Would they do it though? Of course not. It would scare the hell out of their users if they knew how this algo actually worked.
"People You May Know is based on a variety of factors, including mutual friends, work and education information, networks you’re part of, contacts you’ve imported and many other factors,” said the spokesperson by email. “Without additional information from the people involved, we’re not able to explain why one person was recommended as a friend to another."<p>Facebook is full of shit. Of course they are using locations, why else would I get suggestion to friend the guy that cuts my Mother in Law's yard - he stops by for a check from my wife.
> It’s a massive privacy fail,<p>I can't believe "fail" has become the standard noun instead of failure. It started as a lolcatism and now is standard.
It should be a lot easier for everyone to collectively sue Facebook and other social networks for violation of privacy.<p>This is just one of the economic asymmetries where small annoyances to everyone, but not enough to individually do anything about it, aggregate to billions for a few in power.<p>The only social network we need is a collective legal one.
I know for a fact that Facebook uses my phone contacts to suggest friends. When I started at a new job and was exchanging numbers with coworkers, they would appear as a suggested friend within 24 hours.<p>My doctor also showed up as a suggestion. I figured either the office phone number was linked to his FB page, or FB was scanning my calendar events and linked me to him that way.
I regularly have people show up on my "People You May Know" that have no mutual friends with me, and I don't know them so they certainly don't have my email address or phone number. Oftentimes it's people who went to the same university as me, so I wonder if they base it on friends of friends of friends and other less direct connections.
I assume the connector is the doctor - why doesn't she have a work phone with the patient's numbers that she doesn't use Facebook on? Then the chance of patients being connected to one another is dramatically lower.
tl;dr<p>"When Lisa looked at her Facebook profile, she was surprised to see that she had, at some point, given Facebook her cell phone number. It’s a number that her patients could also have in their phones."
Ironically, before it lets me read this story the site pops up a "LIKE US ON FACEBOOK!" prompt. I'm pretty sure once I do that all you fellow article-readers will be my next friends.
"Unfortunately, due to health privacy reasons, Lisa was not able to put me in touch with her patients directly"<p>You mean: "Fortunately..."
She lives in a small town, she specializes in treating a small subset of that population. It is quite possible the patients were recommended as friends as coincidence, not having anything to do with her.
> “Without additional information from the people involved, we’re not able to explain why one person was recommended as a friend to another.”<p>Such a terrible excuse. FB you only have one job! Fail.
But I'm still a paranoid lunatic because I don't want to smear my picture all over the web and give my every scrap of data away for the dubious benefits of Facebook or Twitter...
Talk about blowing something simple out of proportion.<p>All these people have one friend in common with this person, maybe they know each other as well? Being a psychiatrist or whatever has nothing to do with it.<p>EDIT: I stand corrected. Not so simple regarding where they get the "potential friendship" data from. Diagonal reading mistake on my part.