You can share your phones contact list with Facebook.
What this means is that even if you have never used Facebook before, one of your friends could have shared your details (name, phone, email) to Facebook because they have chosen to provide/sync their phonebook/contact list with Facebook. Now Facebook knows who you are and you haven’t even signed up or logged into Facebook ever. https://www.vox.com/2016/10/1/13079770/how-facebook-people-you-may-know-algorithm-works Does Facebook use my phone contacts to make friend recommendations? Yes. If you share your phone contacts with Facebook or Facebook Messenger, the company will use that info to recommend your contacts as “Friends you may know.” Timing is a factor here. That means that you may be more likely to see a friend recommendation from someone you recently added to your phone, versus a contact you’ve had for years. Do both parties need to be saved into each other’s phones? No. If someone has added your number to their contact list, you might see them in your suggested friends list even if you’ve never added their number to your own contact list. It only takes one user to trigger a recommendation. What might be even more worring to you is Facebooks facial recognition AI. Imagine that someone that you don’t know takes a photo and your face happens to be in the background. Facebook can match all the faces in the photo, including yours, and link it to your Facebook profile. Essentially now they have a record of the location and exact time you were there because somebody else uploaded a photo. Regards Adrian Halid From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com <ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com> On Behalf Of Greg Keogh Sent: Thursday, 23 January 2020 2:33 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Subject: [OT] What Facebook knows Folks, most of us probably know what I'm about to say, but when you see it live, it's really frightening. My wife had to join Facebook for the first time ever to follow her nephew who is a firefighter in the ongoing disaster. She joined okay without being asked for a phone number. The next day she tried to get in via the Apple App and it demanded a mobile number. It was an absolute block until a number was entered, so she was compelled to. Now it gets scary... She immediately was offered hundreds of friends that included my friends, musicians I have played with, her old work mates in jobs going back 40 years, extended family adult and children friends of both sides of our family, old workmates of mine going back to the 1980s, etc, and the list goes on to find obscure and tenuous links of every imaginable kind. So … given that she has never been on FB before … where did all those associations come from? We know they have good algorithms of course, but it means that FB could be used to perform a comprehensive and reliable analysis of the complete life of someone who isn't even a member. Imagine if the police, or criminals, or an oppressive government simply asked FB "what do you know about person X?" Even if X isn't a member, they could compile a fantastically detailed dossier. How much information does FB hold? Who are they sharing it with? It's worse than we think. Greg K
