How does Facebook know who you might be familiar with

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

How the friend recommendation system works on the most popular social network on the planet.

How Facebook's friend recommendation mechanism works

You would think that Facebook recommends friends in the same way as it does in real life: you say that you know someone, and you are advised by people that someone knows. In fact, social networking systems are much more complex and the results of their work are less obvious.

Beyond the Facebook profile you created for yourself, there is another one. For him, data is collected from incoming messages and smartphones of other users. Your account is linked to contact information that you have never provided to the service.

Such shadow profiles have been known for several years, but many people are unaware of their potential or even unaware of their existence. You can't even find out how much a company knows about you until an incomprehensible recommendation pops up.

Take some unnamed lawyer. Facebook doesn't scan his work email, but the mailbox itself probably knows, even if the lawyer never gave it to the company. If someone who has this lawyer's email address in their contacts decides to share it with Facebook, then the company can create a connection between the lawyer and anyone who also knows this mailbox.

Imagine what difficulties all this can create, for example, for a police officer who works undercover. He will have to maintain the highest degree of secrecy so that no one person can tie his two personalities together. If even one Facebook user has contact information for both individuals, the consequences will be catastrophic.

With all the information available, the company can not only connect you with those who have your contact details. If two different people have your email address or phone number, then the social network will assume that these users also know each other. And it doesn't have to be an address or number that you provided to Facebook yourself.

What to do if you want to take away the company's access to your data

You will have to find everyone to whom you have ever shared your contacts and who uploaded them to a social network. Then, one by one, it is enough to ask to go to the page for managing invitations and imported contacts and delete the information.

“When the contact is removed, we will erase it from our systems. But, of course, there is a possibility that the same contact was uploaded by someone else,”Steinfeld wrote.

The shadow profile cannot be disabled. The only thing you can do to prevent the system from working is to prevent people from finding your profile by phone number or email address. To do this, you need to go to the Facebook privacy settings.

But that doesn't apply to your shadow profile either. The company cannot even give users the ability to view this hidden information, as this would be a violation of the privacy of those people who provided the data.