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.
Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you have any idea if there were private records that were included in such searches? Church or baptismal, or medical records, perhaps?
Private sources were fine, the memories of your grandparents could classify someone's entire family as black.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#113I 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.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#114The 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/ 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-…
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Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#115The 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/ 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-…
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by taking the thread on a political/ideological flamewar tangent. Would you please not do this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15105534 and marked it off-topic.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#116> 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?
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#117Though 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 res…
Profound. I don't think this explains the connection in the original post, but everything else you say makes a lot of sense.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#118Though 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 res…
Profound. I don't think this explains the connection in the original post, but everything else you say makes a lot of sense.
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...
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#119The 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/ 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-…
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by taking the thread on a political/ideological flamewar tangent. Would you please not do this? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15105534 and marked it off-topic.
You and I have very clearly different views on this.
I'm finding HN's views on this matter increasingly untenable.
I'd suggest you please not do that.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wonder how this could work when Whatsapp advertises that conversations are encrypted end-to-end.
It's end-to-end-encrypted between the proprietary WhatsApp clients, but they might very well scan things inside of the WhatsApp client.