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.
Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
51–60 of 131 posts
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#52And 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…
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.
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.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#53The 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-…
It would be much appreciated if you could leave the political hyperbole somewhere else.
You can make a point without stooping to tenuous, politically motivated, and controversial accusations.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#54facebook 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.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#55Or 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.
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?
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.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#56If 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.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#57The 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-…
While I can see how someone could draw similarities in the aggregation of user data, I disagree about that being a comparable system for many reasons. Namely that they aren't government systems, and the political environment doesn't reflect, nor are projected to reflect a state of genocide.
This falls into the same line of thinking as "I need my assault weapon to fight the government when it becomes tyrannical." It's an unreasonable conclusion that comes from a reasonable set of first principals because the landscape is so different now than in the comparing period.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#58The 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-…
It would be much appreciated if you could leave the political hyperbole somewhere else. You can make a point without stooping to tenuous, politically motivated, and controversial accusations.
Those are in fact the most relevant elements of this question. They are elements which, as in the case of the Netherlands, don't matter at all, until they mean everything.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#59The 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-…
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.
Re: Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
#60I 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…
This seems like a fairly obvious and good explanation.
Also one of the other relatives could have since joined Facebook to make this a little simpler.