Wouldn’t surprise me
FoxNews: Facebook Building ‘Shadow Profiles’ of Non-Members, Experts Allege
I was late to the facebook party. But when I signed up, it was ready for me. It already knew who I knew from my personal life, my blog life, and my professional life. As a rule, I never befriend people with whom I have a professional relationship. But facebook already knew who I knew. So, I would not find this surprising at all, even though it is a little tin foily.
October 24th, 2011 at 9:49 am
Me, too. I never befriend anyone at my day job. And even though I’ve got the privacy options set quite high, I assume that everything that I write will be read by everyone in my life anyway.
October 24th, 2011 at 9:56 am
There is a cure for that you know…..
October 24th, 2011 at 11:57 am
The genuinely evil feature is the offer to “help” you by uploading your email contacts list. Since a lot of programs automatically save contact information for people to whom you have sent email, or people from whom you have received it, then if any one of those people clicks on the offer, you’re found.
October 24th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
yeah, i didn’t do that.
October 24th, 2011 at 12:08 pm
The contact-upload feature is the keystone of Linked-In.
October 24th, 2011 at 12:11 pm
Pet peeve of mine is when people who never bother to email me for anything else send the email through their facebook/linkedin/etc asking me to friend them when I DON’T HAVE AN ACCOUNT. Really makes me feel like your friend when the only way you ever communicate is by letting some social network send a blanked email to everyone in your inbox.
October 24th, 2011 at 3:36 pm
What’s “evil” about that, craig?
There’s no evil in “knowing that a person exists”, I’m pretty sure.
For something like 99% of users, their email contacts are an excellent way to do exactly the thing they’re trying to do there – find the people they know, on Facebook.
(Then again, “It alleges that users are encouraged to hand over the personal data of other people — including names, phone numbers, email addresses and more — which Facebook is using to create “extensive profiles” of non-users.” seems like an odd thing to have a “privacy complaint” about.
That entire complaint they link to makes me want to vomit. I wonder if he’s aware that every search engine probably also knows his email address and phone number and “isn’t updated” and has no way to ensure the information is “correct”.
Tempest. Teapot.
His name is, naturally, blacked out of his complaint, but I’d bet a dollar he’s in the phone book and a trivial web search would find me his email address.)
October 24th, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Sigivald, it’s evil because automatic uploading profiles behavior more intimately and effectively than individually-chosen “friending” does. [Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.] would have had no way of knowing most of these person-to-person connections existed if someone hadn’t carelessly uploaded them.
Just as an example, the phone book will tell you about Mr. A. It cannot tell you that Mr. A is in contact with Miss B as well as Divorce Lawyer C, Esq.
E-mail contacts attributable to a person are the internet equivalent of pen register data. Most people don’t stop to contemplate the profiling capability of that information.
October 25th, 2011 at 10:37 am
This site is my FaceBook.