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Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

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Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#11

Post by mrweasel »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #7

> “Without additional information from the people involved, we’re not able to explain why one person was recommended as a friend to another.” Such a terrible excuse. FB you only have one job! Fail.

Facebook must understand how weird that sounds. How can they not know why people are recommended to each other?

They really do need to dig into the issue, if in fact they don't know. Because something seriously need to be excluded from their recommendation algorithm if the article is true.

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#12

Post by throwanem »

phn wrote: post #6
throwanem wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to take another look at the article; your understanding appears to include a severe oversimplification.

You're right, I stand corrected. The technique is still simple, the way they get the data is not so transparent to the user.

I'm not sure how they get it at all, except via contact list mining. It makes sense that the doctor's phone number is part of her Facebook account. It does not make sense that her patients, who have not added her as a "friend" there, would nonetheless have explicitly told Facebook her number from their end. (I don't even think that's a thing you can do.)

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#13

Post by throwanem »

petra wrote: post #10
throwanem wrote: post #2

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Granted, that's Schmidt, rather than Zuckerberg. The attitude seems to be the same, though.

Until of course some journalist started digging deep into Schmidt, than the tune was completely different.

Well, of course. He did say "you", after all.

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#14

Post by throwanem »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #9

TLDR#1: The investigation still didn't reveal exactly how this happened. 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. " This is about as practical as recommendi…

Especially since odds are the data being correlated comes from the contact lists in her patients' phones. Even successfully confounding geolocation won't solve that.

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#16

Post by ubernostrum »

throwanem wrote: post #12
phn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I stand corrected. The technique is still simple, the way they get the data is not so transparent to the user.

I'm not sure how they get it at all, except via contact list mining. It makes sense that the doctor's phone number is part of her Facebook account. It does not make sense that her patients, who have not added her as a "friend" there, would nonetheless have explicitly told Facebook her number from their end. (I don't even think that's a thing you can do.)

Facebook will happily slurp your entire contact list even if you're not FB friends with all of them. And the algorithms almost certainly know and take into account having someone in your contacts as a way to build a graph of relationships.

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#17

Post by tudorw »

mrweasel wrote: post #11
untilHellbanned wrote: post #7

> “Without additional information from the people involved, we’re not able to explain why one person was recommended as a friend to another.” Such a terrible excuse. FB you only have one job! Fail.

Facebook must understand how weird that sounds. How can they not know why people are recommended to each other? They really do need to dig into the issue, if in fact they don't know. Because something seriously need to be excluded from their recommendation algorithm if the article is true.

not surprising really, I have often written software, returned a decade later and had to unravel why it does what it does, even though I am one person and it's just a few thousand lines of code, I can well imagine the FB system is too complex for any individual to inspect, and if the record keeping and documentation on the whys as well as the hows is incomplete then we are we are...

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#18

Post by dunkelheit »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #7

> “Without additional information from the people involved, we’re not able to explain why one person was recommended as a friend to another.” Such a terrible excuse. FB you only have one job! Fail.

Actually it is the most reasonable thing for them to say. Anything more specific would be a privacy violation in itself.

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#19

Post by ethanbond »

mrweasel wrote: post #11
untilHellbanned wrote: post #7

> “Without additional information from the people involved, we’re not able to explain why one person was recommended as a friend to another.” Such a terrible excuse. FB you only have one job! Fail.

Facebook must understand how weird that sounds. How can they not know why people are recommended to each other? They really do need to dig into the issue, if in fact they don't know. Because something seriously need to be excluded from their recommendation algorithm if the article is true.

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't know. They also don't know how timelines are generated.

Strange place.

Re: Facebook recommended that a psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

#20

Post by throwanem »

ubernostrum wrote: post #16
throwanem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how they get it at all, except via contact list mining. It makes sense that the doctor's phone number is part of her Facebook account. It does not make sense that her patients, who have not added her as a "friend" there, would nonetheless have explicitly told Facebook her number from their end. (I don't even think that's a thing you can do.)

Facebook will happily slurp your entire contact list even if you're not FB friends with all of them. And the algorithms almost certainly know and take into account having someone in your contacts as a way to build a graph of relationships.

Exactly. And, of course, there is not even a way to flag some contacts as private, or otherwise to be excluded from social graph analysis.

I mean, I guess you could keep those contacts in a note or some other record outside your contacts list, and just tap to call or email or whatever. But that only works as long as the Facebook app doesn't decide it needs access to that kind of record, too. And when you find yourself going that far out of your way to circumvent something that's installed on your phone, maybe it's time to think about whether that thing is more trouble than it's worth.

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