![]() These recommendations are, after all, a two-way street. Instead, the most likely explanation for most of these scenarios was that the other person may have been looking at our profile or may have recently added us to their phone’s contact list. So we asked Facebook about it.įacebook insists that the shared location in the cases above were coincidences. In all of these instances, it sure seemed like Facebook was using some kind of tracking - either location or web tracking - to inform these recommendations. In another, I looked up a new acquaintance on LinkedIn before a meeting and, hours later, Facebook recommended we connect. I experienced other odd moments, like seeing an acquaintance I’ve known for years atop the list while waiting in the lobby of his office. Within a few hours, that person appeared at the top of Jason’s recommendations. In another, Jason met with a company spokesperson he hadn’t previously met. A few hours later, Jason appeared as a recommended friend on the acquaintance’s Facebook account. In one instance, Jason saw an acquaintance pass by him on the street, but didn’t stop to talk to him. ![]() How does Facebook generate these eerily coincidental recommendations? When my colleague Jason Del Rey and I recently experienced a number of oddly timed recommendations, we started to get curious ourselves. The problem with this feature is that it can be really creepy.įacebook previously employed user locations to recommend friends, but says it has stopped doing that Fusion recently wrote about a psychiatrist who claims her mental health patients were being prompted to connect with one another on the service. ![]() One of the ways it carries out that mission is by recommending new friends for you every time you open the app or website - essentially, the company identifies other people on Facebook that it thinks you already know, and nudges you to connect with them inside Facebook’s walls. At the time, people could choose to share this information with Messenger, but it was not used for People You May Know.”įacebook has a pretty clear and straightforward company mission: Connect everybody in the world. We said that we didn’t, and we also explained that the Facebook for Android app didn’t collect this information. Among other examples, we were asked whether Facebook used information about who you call and text to make friend suggestions. “Recode contacted us about a story on People You May Know and what information Facebook used to make friend suggestions. Here’s a statement from a Facebook spokesperson. ![]() We assumed their denial about collecting this data was company-wide. It wasn’t clear to us that this answer was specific to the core Facebook app, and the company did not offer up info at the time that Messenger was collecting this data. A company spokesperson said Facebook’s answer at the time was specific to the Facebook app, not the Messenger app. We went back to Facebook to ask why we were told otherwise. In March 2018, we learned that Facebook does indeed collect text and call data from some Android users through its Messenger app. Company Correction - April 1, 2018: When reporting this story on how Facebook recommends connections for its “People You May Know” feature, we asked Facebook if it collected text and call data from users.
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