[Air-L] How does Facebook find friends?

[Lawson Fletcher]

Hi all,

Regarding Marco's point, this is important because it goes back to the
'reciprocity' or whatever you'd like to call it of Facebook, namely that
even if I have been extremely careful and guarded about what info I share on
Facebook and what I allow it access to, the moment one of my friends has not
done the same, and is in some way connected to information of mine (through
a post comment, a shared photo, etc. etc.), then the profile is reopened in
a sense. The only true privacy is not to be on it, but even that doesn't
stop people posting photographs of you on there.

Cheers,
Lawson

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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 01:42:21 -0300
From: "Marco Toledo Bastos" <herrcafe at gmail.com>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Subject: Re: [Air-L] How does Facebook find friends?
Message-ID: <001201cb5c6c$0c899e40$259cdac0$@com>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"

Anders,

This also got me thinking. It all started a few years ago when my
hairdresser, who I went to once, and who has sent me a few emails, turned up
as a
FB suggestion. We didn't have any friends in common and I most certainly
have NOT allowed FB to go thru my Gmail contacts (or any other account).
This all had happened once before when FB suggested another person with whom
I sure shared no friends whatsoever.

Since I'm dead sure I haven't given Facebook permission to contact my Gmail
account and FB sure isn't allowed to mine my cache, I was ready to go
paranoid (seemed like Facebook was stealing my Gmail contacts). But after a
few emails to friends and nerds of all stripes, we came up with the
conclusion that it was the hairdresser who allowed FB to collect *her*
contact info. That's how FB knew we had been in contact in a given moment.

Bottom line: there are only two ways FB could have gotten that info from me.
Either by mining my Chrome cache, and I refuse to consider this possibility,
or breaking into Googles's office in Mountain View, since Gmail was the only
place where I had that info stored. So getting back to your question, the
kid might not know his uncle's e-mail, but my two cent is that the uncle's
contact list sure includes the kid's name and/or his e-mail.

Either way, this is not good. But it is the future, and the future is here.

[]s
MTB



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