Facebook Just Got a Whole Lot Creepier

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I’ve been creeped out by Facebook for a long time now. The following story takes it to another level.

From Fusion:

While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why.

“I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone. 

The next week, things got weirder.

Most of her patients are senior citizens or people with serious health or developmental issues, but she has one outlier: a 30-something snowboarder. Usually, Facebook would recommend he friend people his own age, who snowboard and jump out of planes. But Lisa told me that he had started seeing older and infirm people, such as a 70-year-old gentleman with a walker and someone with cerebral palsy.

“He laughed and said, ‘I don’t know any of these people who showed up on my list— I’m guessing they see you,’” recounted Lisa. “He showed me the list of friend recommendations, and I recognized some of my patients.”

She sat there awkwardly and silently. To let him know that his suspicion was correct would violate her duty to protect her patients’ privacy. 

Another one of her female patients had a friend recommendation pop up for a fellow patient she recognized from the office’s elevator. Suddenly, she knew the other patient’s full name along with all their Facebook profile information.

“It’s a massive privacy fail,” said Lisa. “I have patients with HIV, people that have attempted suicide and women in coercive and violent relationships.”

Lisa lives in a relatively small town and was alarmed that Facebook was inadvertently outing people with health and psychiatric issues to her network. She’s a tech-savvy person, familiar with VPNs, Tor and computer security practices recommended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation–but she had no idea what was causing it.

She hadn’t friended any of her patients on Facebook, nor looked up their profiles. She didn’t have a guest wifi network at the office that they were all using. After seeing my report that Facebook was using location from people’s smartphones to make friend recommendations, she was convinced this happened because she had logged into Facebook at the office on her personal computer. She thought that Facebook had figured out that she and her patients were all in the same place repeatedly. However, Facebook says it only briefly used location for friend recommendations in a test and that it was just “at the city-level.

When Lisa looked at her Facebook profile, she was surprised to see that she had, at some point, given Facebook her cell phone number. It’s a number that her patients could also have in their phones. Many people don’t realize that if they give Facebook access to their phone contacts, it uses that information to make friend recommendations; so if your ex-boss or your one-time Tinder date or your psychiatrist is a contact in your phone, you might start seeing them pop up in the “People You May Know” list.

That’s my guess as to how this happened.

The above tale presents a good opportunity to revisit a post highlighted last year by Salim Varani titled, A Very Disturbing and Powerful Post – “Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook.” In it, he warned:

“Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’re getting off Facebook,” is the guilty and reluctant question I’m hearing a lot these days. Like we kinda know Facebook is bad, but don’t really want to know.

I’ve been a big Facebook supporter – one of the first users in my social group who championed what a great way it was to stay in touch, way back in 2006. I got my mum and brothers on it, and around 20 other people. I’ve even taught Facebook marketing in one of the UK’s biggest tech education projects, Digital Business Academy. I’m a techie and a marketer — so I can see the implications — and until now, they hadn’t worried me. I’ve been pretty dismissive towards people who hesitate with privacy concerns.

With this latest privacy change on January 30th, I’m scared.

For more on the perils of Facebook, see:

Former Facebook Curators Reveal How Conservative News is Censored

Video of the Day – Three Former U.S. Treasury Secretaries and a Facebook Executive Laugh About Income Inequality

At Facebook, Some Hate Speech is More Equal Than Others

Facebook Caught Secretly Lobbying for Privacy Destroying “Cyber Security” Bill

Facebook Reveals its Master Plan – Control All News Flow

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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10 thoughts on “Facebook Just Got a Whole Lot Creepier”

  1. You might be a conspiracy theorist…

    …if you believe that some of the largest, most successful tech companies in America, and the world, are vaulted to the top of their industries and market share not by how innovative and creative their technology is… but by how in-bed they are with governments operating creepy and unconstitutional surveillance programs upon the unsuspecting public and their users.

    Reply
    • The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows
      In-Q-Tel provides only limited information about its investments, and some of its trustees have ties to funded companies
      The idea for a CIA-funded venture-capital firm came from former CIA director George Tenet, shown above in 2015, in the late 1990s.
      By
      Damian Paletta
      Aug. 30, 2016 4:02 p.m. ET

      Forterra Systems Inc., a California startup focused on virtual reality, was in need of money and its products didn’t have much commercial appeal. Then funds came in from a source based far from Silicon Valley:

      In-Q-Tel Inc., a venture-capital firm in Virginia funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

      One catalyst for the 2007 infusion, according to a former Forterra executive and others familiar with it, was a recommendation by a man who sat on the board of the venture-capital firm—and also on the board of Forterra.

      In-Q-Tel pumped in cash, Forterra developed some tools useful to the military, and government contracts started coming in.

      Like the agency that founded it, the CIA-funded venture-capital firm operates largely in the shadows. In-Q-Tel officials regard the firm as independent, yet it has extremely close ties to the CIA and runs almost all investment decisions by the spy agency. The firm discloses little about how it picks companies to invest in, never says how much, and sometimes doesn’t reveal the investments at all.

      Even less well-known are potential conflicts of interest the arrangement entails, as seen in this Forterra example and others continuing to the present.

      Nearly half of In-Q-Tel’s trustees have a financial connection of one kind or another with a company In-Q-Tel has funded, a Wall Street Journal examination of its investments found.

      http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cias-venture-capital-firm-like-its-sponsor-operates-in-the-shadows-1472587352

    • The dumbed down young Americans allow this because of lowering standards to pacify and the bought out biased medias propaganda LIES, especially government propaganda LIES that breed FRAUDULENT elections and now race and gay bait articles to cause civil unrest to push certain agendas ask George soros duh! huh!

  2. Fakebook uses gps coordinates. As patients converge to a common place when they go for therapy, not only the psy gets the sugfestion but also the clients. The location is the common denominator.

    Reply
  3. What Hap said.

    As to Zuckerberg:

    The Narcissism Epidemic

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv2LkAWc7Tk

    The first time I ever became aware of MySpace (remember that?) and Facebook my immediate gut reaction was, “Holy shit! Do all of these self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic dickweeds actually think that other people are interested in where they’re going to have dinner this evening?! Surely this will just be another flash in the pan and it will go away as quickly as it came”. Boy, was I ever wrong.

    Facebook is just a reflection of Mark Zuckerberg’s narcissistic personality disorder. But it’s also a reflection of the millions of people who also have narcissistic personality disorder.

    From a much broader 30,000 foot perspective it is a classic example of the social engineering that caused the narcissism epidemic which has enabled the deep state to easily surveil huge swaths of the population worldwide both as individuals and as groups.

    That’s no accident. It is not just happenstance.

    Reply
  4. This is a violation of Federal law. Called, “HIPAA,” it’s all about health information privacy. It’s illegal to let that information out, it’s illegal to obtain it improperly.

    Fuckerberg is guilty of millions of felonies. Will anyone prosecute? Nope. Because, despite the propaganda, this is NOT a government of the people by hte people for the people. If it were, you’d be able to bring a criminal charge.

    You can’t.

    Reply
  5. Chucked it ten years ago when total unknowns wanted to be my friend.
    I find it highly amusing how presumably intelligent, qualified professionals allow themselves to be pigeonholed into participating with this demeaning gossip based nonsense.
    Good Luck. But also get a life.

    Reply
  6. Location Services anyone? FB is responding to the fact you all frequent the same location. Whatever is there (the algorithm doesn’t care) is something you all have in common = you could be friends.
    Could be its a library, or a knitting shop, turns out it’s where you divulge your innermost secrets.
    Welcome to the panopticon; this isn’t even clever or devious, just stupid.

    Reply

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