Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
I’ve been creeped out by Facebook for a long time now. The following story takes it to another level.
From Fusion:
While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why.
“I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone.
The next week, things got weirder.
Most of her patients are senior citizens or people with serious health or developmental issues, but she has one outlier: a 30-something snowboarder. Usually, Facebook would recommend he friend people his own age, who snowboard and jump out of planes. But Lisa told me that he had started seeing older and infirm people, such as a 70-year-old gentleman with a walker and someone with cerebral palsy.
“He laughed and said, ‘I don’t know any of these people who showed up on my list— I’m guessing they see you,’” recounted Lisa. “He showed me the list of friend recommendations, and I recognized some of my patients.”
She sat there awkwardly and silently. To let him know that his suspicion was correct would violate her duty to protect her patients’ privacy.
Another one of her female patients had a friend recommendation pop up for a fellow patient she recognized from the office’s elevator. Suddenly, she knew the other patient’s full name along with all their Facebook profile information.
“It’s a massive privacy fail,” said Lisa. “I have patients with HIV, people that have attempted suicide and women in coercive and violent relationships.”
Lisa lives in a relatively small town and was alarmed that Facebook was inadvertently outing people with health and psychiatric issues to her network. She’s a tech-savvy person, familiar with VPNs, Tor and computer security practices recommended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation–but she had no idea what was causing it.
She hadn’t friended any of her patients on Facebook, nor looked up their profiles. She didn’t have a guest wifi network at the office that they were all using. After seeing my report that Facebook was using location from people’s smartphones to make friend recommendations, she was convinced this happened because she had logged into Facebook at the office on her personal computer. She thought that Facebook had figured out that she and her patients were all in the same place repeatedly. However, Facebook says it only briefly used location for friend recommendations in a test and that it was just “at the city-level.”
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. Many people don’t realize that if they give Facebook access to their phone contacts, it uses that information to make friend recommendations; so if your ex-boss or your one-time Tinder date or your psychiatrist is a contact in your phone, you might start seeing them pop up in the “People You May Know” list.
That’s my guess as to how this happened.
The above tale presents a good opportunity to revisit a post highlighted last year by Salim Varani titled, A Very Disturbing and Powerful Post – “Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook.” In it, he warned:
“Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’re getting off Facebook,” is the guilty and reluctant question I’m hearing a lot these days. Like we kinda know Facebook is bad, but don’t really want to know.
I’ve been a big Facebook supporter – one of the first users in my social group who championed what a great way it was to stay in touch, way back in 2006. I got my mum and brothers on it, and around 20 other people. I’ve even taught Facebook marketing in one of the UK’s biggest tech education projects, Digital Business Academy. I’m a techie and a marketer — so I can see the implications — and until now, they hadn’t worried me. I’ve been pretty dismissive towards people who hesitate with privacy concerns.
With this latest privacy change on January 30th, I’m scared.
For more on the perils of Facebook, see:
Former Facebook Curators Reveal How Conservative News is Censored
At Facebook, Some Hate Speech is More Equal Than Others
Facebook Caught Secretly Lobbying for Privacy Destroying “Cyber Security” Bill
I have been off of FB for over a year when they got my cell phone number from a related app. I never gave them my cell.
Besides the privacy issues it’s lazy. Pick up a phone and call or email your friends and family. Those glowing images on your computer screen and cute comments are not a relationship. Get out and live your life.
yup
Cancelled mine about 2 years ago. Don’t miss it one bit.
I haven’t deactivated or deleted my FB account, but I did delete a lot of things from it when I learned how invasive it was a few years ago. I pretty much limit comments to picture of my birds and bunnies (Bunny Chick TV for hillbillies) and share the occasional article from this blog or others I read. That makes for some interesting ads that show up on my newsfeed.
I started making a Facebook, but after the 2nd question, I said “Fuck this bullshit”, left and never went back. They still send me e-mails of what’s trending, but I don’t even have a login.
If you are on Farcebook .. AND .. you expect privacy …. then you are the world’s biggest goddamn fucking moran. You should be shot and put out of your self-deluded misery.
Never signed up…… never will…. I had a feeling that there were privacy concerns from the get go.
Enter the modern cell phone age…. the meta – data information on you is absolutely stunning.
The same goes for your plastic banking information.
Meta data is an amazing tool for tracking your every move beyond your wildest dreams!
If the cops can do it…. so can FB
But I’ve done nothing wrong…………..
I was one of the first people, relatively speaking, on Facebook, joining in 2004 when it was only available to students at select universities with a valid e-mail address for said school.
I amassed over a thousand friends, all of whom I knew from kindergarten through grad school, work, church, the gym, you name it. It was fun reconnecting after losing touch with many over the course of time.
Fast forward a dozen years and I recently deleted my account altogether. After taking a year hiatus in 2012 and coming back for a few years, nothing had changed. It’s the same updates from the same friends, with the subject matter maturing as life brings new demands. I choose to text, call, or (gasp!) see those who are closest to me.
I occasionally miss seeing updates from peripheral friends, but I’m not missing much, all things considered. The privacy concerns are truly disturbing and I’m better off not wasting precious time to check the daily humdrum. I’ve also avoided a world of drama, from friends’ exes trying to cause trouble to social justice warriors on the warpath to seeing what my friends’ kids are eating for lunch.
Social media is perhaps the largest exercise in vanity in human history and I found myself caught up in it at times, impressing friends with witty comments, sharing exclusive experiences, and portraying myself in the best light possible. I don’t need the “likes” to feel good about myself and prefer to share good things with those who matter most instead of potentially fostering envy among acquaintances.
I might be out of the loop by eschewing all forms of social media and having a near invisible digital footprint, but given the direction society is heading I believe it’s the wisest option and would encourage others to do the same.
Never have signed up and never will, if you are my friend, you know where I live. Stop by and let’s have a beer and get caught up. Seems like a better program to me.
Never on FB, Twitter or MySpace. Too many opportunities for identity theft, real theft (I know where you are when you aren’t home) and illegal shenanigans. I never understood what they were supposed to achieve and I don’t share photos, locations or real information with anyone.
Zuckerberg needs to have his identity stolen, privacy invaded and family harassed so that he understands what his efforts have given rise to. And then again, again and again…
Like John, I was an early adopter. I signed up in 2005 when facebook was still exclusive to students with an .edu email account. After college I started using it less and less. Most of my news feed is spammed with advertisers and memes. I deleted my account this past month and have no intention of returning. There’s no point in checking a website whose entire business model is set up to spam me. This past year I’ve deleted all my social media accounts.
Never had Facebook , MySpace , Twitter or any other. Never had a computer or internet until 2011.Got this smart phone two years ago . That’s it.
Besides I got a Cat .He’s social , kinda.
Even more evil than scanning your phone contacts is scanning your photos. I don’t have an account on FB, but I bet they have an account on ME. It probably has my photo, from some seminar / task force / idiot convention I attended in the last ten years, and in which some FB-affiliated “acquaintance” took a picture of a dozen of us and helpfully “tagged” it with all our names. From that, FB steals, attributes and collects – forever.
The coming Butlerian Jihad will have to search out and destroy every FB server and backup, along with all their personnel, clients, contractors and unclassified parasites who use it to try and control us. THAT will be the ultimate education in control theory – why trying to control everything / everyone / all the time cannot and will not work. And when it fails, it will fail spectacularly!
JtW, contemplating the upcoming Butlerian Jihad, and developing an operation plan:[img]https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.Mb77c98db5cff14b9544716de7469ee88o2%26pid%3D15.1&f=1[/img]
I first got on the internet in 1996. (loved the bbs boards) I was very leery of email because I figured there would always be a copy of every email I ever sent stored somewhere so I used it sparingly. Still do! By the time social media came onto the scene there was no way in hell I was going to sign up for that. Never did, never will.
This site and one car-related forum are the only things approximating social media that I use.
I joined in order to reconnect with a friend I had lost track of.
After about a year of useless “friend” invites, retarded photos of meals people ate, and pathetic reminiscing about how awesome high school was, the last straw was some ex-classmate’s post of the contents of her kitchen junk drawer. I immediately deleted my account.
That was five years ago or so, and I have never missed it.
As for Twitter and other such platforms, I know what they are but have never indulged.
TBP is my Facebook. Here, if you are a regular visitor, you are judged on so many different variables that it is impossible to predict what will happen to you from day to day. BUT, you get real world feedback. Not some snowflake bullshit. Just the type of folks I want to connect with in cyberspace.