Wednesday 8 November 2017

Week 7: How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met

How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met: "Facebook doesn’t like, and doesn’t use, the term “shadow profiles.” It doesn’t like the term because it sounds like Facebook creates hidden profiles for people who haven’t joined the network, which Facebook says it doesn’t do.

The existence of shadow contact information came to light in 2013 after Facebook admitted it had discovered and fixed “a bug.” The bug was that when a user downloaded their Facebook file, it included not just their friends’ visible contact information, but also their friends’ shadow contact information.

The problem with the bug, for Facebook, was not that all the information was lumped together—it was that it had mistakenly shown users the lump existed.

The extent of the connections Facebook builds around its users is supposed to be visible only to the company itself.

Facebook does what it can to underplay how much data it gathers through contacts, and how widely it casts its net." 'via Blog this'

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