[IT'S] ACTUALLY PSYCHOTIC. [IT'S] INSANELY JEALOUS. [IT'S] IRRATIONAL, AND I'M SCARED OF [IT]: A viewing of The Social Network this weekend did nothing to change my mind about any of the reasons, both good and bad, that I have for never having used Facebook as a social medium. That's not to say that I haven't signed up for Facebook, though, because I have. I did it because I have to use it for some job-related research. So I gave Facebook my name, sex, and birth date, and nothing else (except that I've fed it the names of some people I've tried to locate, again, for work and not personal reasons).
Because I'm not a Facebook power-user, I haven't followed the news about its privacy issues too closely, but from what I recall, it has focused on Facebook's harvesting of the data you exchange over the site -- your list of friends, the links you exchange, and the personal data you enter yourself -- for profit. That's bad, but in a what-did-you-expect kind of way. It's no different from what the banks do.
I can't shake the feeling that Facebook is engaged in a more ominous kind of data gathering, though. As I said, I've given Facebook nothing more than my name (I'm aware of a half-dozen or so other people in the US with the same name) and birth date. The searches I've run are work-related, and do not include my own friends. Yet Facebook has proven remarkably adept in identifying and suggesting that I friend people I knew in high school (and before), in law school, and from this very blog. It couldn't have guessed these names from the information I've exchanged over Facebook itself, since I haven't exchanged anything potentially relevant. It couldn't have guessed these names from "blogs and news media" from which Facebook admits to supplementing user profiles, because I blog under a pseudonym and am, sadly, unfamous.
But the names it has identified bear a striking resemblance to the names of people in my (supposedly private, secure) Outlook email account. Facebook knows very few of my college friends, with whom I have mostly lost touch. Yet it frequently identifies as a potential friend the crazy person who emails every lawyer in San Francisco to see who can take his paranoid anti-FBI litigation. It hasn't tried to put me in touch with any of the people for whom I've searched using Facebook, but it often tries to get me to friend a woman with the same name as a client contact of mine.
I don't want to say that I don't have a problem with a site that harvests information I exchange over it. I have a much greater problem, though, with a site that reads my email without my permission -- particularly if it's a site that admits in the past to harvesting and selling data. I'm a lawyer who works with a lot of documents subject to varying legal confidentiality requirements, some out of the ordinary even for lawyers accustomed to the attorney-client privilege. I have never consented to Facebook viewing my emails (even to/from) information, and I never would.
Is anybody else out there really skeeved out by this? Or have I completely missed the boat on Facebook's friend-suggestion algorithm?
Some of that sounds completely skeevy, yes. But some of it sounds like Facebook is harvesting information from OTHER people's email accounts, with their permission. I.e., the crazy anti-FBI guy has used the Facebook "friend finder" -- which involves him giving Facebook access to HIS address book, and you are in his address book. Now you and crazy guy are linked, not because of anything YOU did or any of YOUR information but because someone else fed Facebook your email address, thereby connecting you with that person forever.
ReplyDeleteThe same-name-as-client one, though...that seems ominous.
If your theory is correct, that is scary.
ReplyDeleteHere's the one question that I have that isn't covered in your post: have you friended anyone on Facebook? I am not an avid user of facebook, either---I am terrible about checking it, and will actually manage to be worse about it now that I no longer will have updates from my friend's cat to check on---but I have friended people. So I've always assumed that the friend suggestions were in connection with that. If you have any SF lawyer friends, for example, who friend anyone who is suggested or who asks to be friend, that could explain the crazy person being recommended.
Or not.
BTW, anyone who has tried to contact me through facebook: I am terrible, terrible, terrible about keeping up with it, and the recent privacy news isn't going to lure me in. So please don't take it personally if I haven't responded.
This. I can't imagine how FB would access your Outlook information (which is located on your computer, right?), but they certainly use other people's email accounts against you.
ReplyDeleteI have never friended anybody. The Friend Finder/contacts thing seems plausible, although I'd be surprised if I'm actually in the Outlook contacts of some of the people that show up. My wife's friends? People on this blog? Where are they getting that information, I wonder?
ReplyDeleteFB sez:
ReplyDelete<span>If you have ever used the Friend Finder feature, Suggestions may show people who have your email address in their address book and/or contacts that you have in your address book. If you would like Facebook to remove these contacts, please follow the instructions found here.</span>
I have no inside information, but from what I can deduce from my similar "how the heck did Facebook connect me with this person?" incidents, the feature to let Facebook scan your email for potential friends doesn't just scan your contacts. It looks at the to/from addresses of every piece of mail in your account.
ReplyDeleteSo, if you sent a message to a mailing list, and someone on that mailing list lets FB scan their email, you and that stranger are now linked permanently in the graph. Facebook might suggest that person as a friend, or even other people that person knows that have professional or academic overlap with you.
I had an experience that kind of freaked me out about a year ago, when Facebook suggested I add as friends (on the same day, no less) two women I had dated. I had no Facebook friends in common with them, hadn't worked with them, hadn't attended school with them, etc., so I had no idea how Facebook knew I knew them. I was kind of upset about it. After giving it some thought, I came to the same conclusion as snm above -- that they both must have used Friend Finder and I was in their email contacts. It may not even be necessary that you are listed as an actual "contact" of the Friend Finder user though. Maybe they just emailed you once, or you were both recipients of the same mass email and the sender didn't use BCC. Either way your info would be embedded in their email account somehow and could probably be harvested. It is scary stuff.
ReplyDeleteI have never used the Friend Finder feature. And I highly doubt that everybody who randomly shows up in my "people you might know" sidebar has used the Friend Finder feature. But let's accept that that's true. It (a) as K says, doesn't explain why it's spitting out a same-name-different-person than a client contact of mine; and (b) is still a huge problem for me, to the extent that Facebook is mining the information. Public (or commercial) information linking my clients to me would be a big problem.
ReplyDeleteLinkedIn and Twitter do the same thing. It looks through your contacts as generated by any email you've sent to/from someone. If you registered with email address you often use to send email to people, and those people allow FB to scan their address books, you'll be pointed to them when you sign up. FB already knows you're a node on the network...it's just letting you know that it knows.
ReplyDeleteIf you think that's a lot, think of what Google has on you. Marrying your entire search history to your entire email history to your network, with their histories and their networks, is a data gold mine. It's that gold mine that is both very scary and the cause of so much good that Google provides. I think you have to accept that if you want to use the internet, you have to understand that you cannot remain anonymous. It's your choice.
Jake is right -- it's very easy to link your Gmail address book with Facebook and Gmail actually adds every email address you've ever received email from or sent email to to your address book. I occassionally go through my Gmail address book to clear out those contacts, in fact.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't assume most people in your sidebar haven't used the Friend Finder feature. A few months ago, Facebook had it "stickied" to the top of Facebook to remind people to use it. And I believe it's now part of creating a new account -- you know, "Welcome to Facebook! Thanks for giving us your name! Now let us help you find people you know -- all you have to do is enter your email address here and we'll pull that information for you!" I would venture to guess that most technologically unsophisticated people will just do it.
Two guesses:
ReplyDelete1) The "people you may know" may not all have used Friend Finder. Maybe both you and they were recipients of a mass email from someone who did use Friend Finder. FF harvested that email and guessed that the recipients might know not only the sender, but each other.
2) On the same name/different person issue -- my guess is that the algorithm is less than 100% accurate, because a certain amount of guesswork must be involved in matching up harvested email addresses with Facebook users (because so many people use multiple addresses). So maybe someone you know, who has emailed both you and "Jane Smith" used Friend Finder, but the "Jane Smith" you know isn't on Facebook. FF guessed that you might know Jane, but when it went to match up the address with the Facebook user, it found the wrong person, another Jane Smith who you don't know and who in fact does not own the email address in question.
I hear you. I too am super careful about NOT signing up for/agreeing for any function that would suck my email info out, but yet I get random friend recommendations for someone I emailed with, once, about catering. I suspect google; I signed up on FB originally with my campus email (back when you had to have a campus address to sign up), but never get any contacts from there (and believe me, I'd know). It's all random emails that must be from my gmail account (which is my FB email address with them now).
ReplyDeleteSeriously? There are people who permit Facebook access to their email accounts? Um, why?
ReplyDeleteI just don't get that. I understand typing in the names of folks that you want to find. I understand putting info on your page that (as it happens) Facebook has been able to access---either because you don't care if that info is public, or you didn't realize that Facebook was going to troll for data. But why open the door to Facebook having access to your email, whether just your address book, or your to/from info? What makes that a good idea?
Judging from some of the people in my "people you may know" list, and assuming use of the Friend Finder, I am just amazed at the kinds of intelligent people who would do a very questionable thing -- give Facebook unfettered access to their work Outlook accounts.
ReplyDeleteI've never had a facebook account (therefore never given them permission to access or share anything about me), but had a similarly creepy experience with it.
ReplyDeleteI received an email from a realtor inviting me to visit their facebook page, but at the bottom of the (what I assume was a form) email, facebook had tacked on an invite of their own. Something to the effect of "We see that you've emailed these other people who are on facebook, and thought you might like to connect with them"
and proceeded to list out the profiles of people I had emailed over the last several years (and some that I hadn't...for example the teenage daughter of a musician I'd bought a CD from). Many of whom were not in my address book. What business is it of facebook (a company I have NO relationship with) who I have emailed? Who gave them permission to scroll around in my email account? Not me.
It's one thing if a company does something with information you've shared, with your permission. It's a whole other egregious thing if a company stealthily gathers info in a way that you have no control over, and uses it (or stores it) for its own purposes. Facebook and Google are not our friends.
After I posted, and left this site, I popped over to Sepinwall's blog. But the page load there hung up, and the status bar showed that it was waiting for facebook plugins to load. Hmmm....did facebook somehow know I was dissing it over here? ;-)
ReplyDeleteTo bring this full circle, having seen The Social Network, I now imagine that MZ just writes all of his own personal failings into the Facebook code. So of course Facebook is monitoring you and knows you were dissing it over here, and of course it is retaliating.
ReplyDeleteI did it, and it still doesn't bother me. It doesn't feel like a quantitatively different invasion of my privacy than the existence of my FB account itself, which, after all, has a list of 100 or so people I know. The fact that FB additionally has a list of a bunch of people I don't know all that well doesn't bug me.
ReplyDeleteWhich is not to say that I'm not generally bugged by most of the ways that FB insinuates itself into my online life. But getting a list of gmail contacts doesn't so much.
While I certainly oppose some of the boneheaded things FB has done (Beacon was an atrociously bad mistake), and I certainly don't approve of policies that involve actual deception (using information in ways that are contrary to the ways the site says it will use information (see, e.g., the Farmville flap)), I have a hard time getting worked up the more fundamental approach the site uses. I can think of contexts in which use of similar information in similar ways by other entities might be horrifying, but the fact that FaceBook uses ingeniously clever schemes to figure out that an advertiser will do better marketing a magazine or book to me than a baseball bat? Meh.
ReplyDeleteI should say that I'm no apologist for Zuckerberg, who seems to be deeply flawed. (Though, even for Sorkin, that movie seemed really heavy-handed in depicting its villains. The scene with "Larry Summers" was almost a parody.)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I'll say that other social networks use similarly curious algorithms -- LinkedIn recently suggested a woman I knew eons ago, with whom I share no friends or other affiliations and whom I've never emailed. I assume it has to be that she was looking at my profile.
And, while we're talking privacy, it's always interesting to me to see people so skeeved out by FaceBook, while they continue to pour their hearts out to Google, which is most definitely keeping tabs on everything you search for, what links you click on from those search results, etc. I suppose it's because Google doesn't connect to your name as transparently as FaceBook, but it certainly knows who you you are.
You are assuming that they're selling the data only for marketing purposes, and that marketers are using it only for those purposes. But I don't see any reason to trust that that's the case.
ReplyDeleteFrom other stuff that I've read, the scene with Larry Summers is not actually an exaggeration.
ReplyDeleteI'm just going to say it - Facebook is the devil.
ReplyDeleteBut, unless Summers slammed himself, any account you read is totally dependent on the Winkelvi's own telling.
ReplyDeleteI'm having trouble, though, thinking of what other nefarious use you have in mind. The worst I can think of (and admittedly, maybe I just lack imagination here) would be some deal whereby they sold insurers information about the doings of their policyholders. But that requires a far more detailed subjective understanding of the meaning of what folks put online than anything FB does today, and I'm skeptical that (given today's technology) it could be cost effective. But again, maybe it's just a failure of imagination. (And again, we tell Google soooo much more, in many respects, than we tell FaceBook.)
ReplyDeleteWell, I will tell you that when I joined linked in it immediately suggested I connect with an ex of mine and apparently sent him a similar suggestion. I had not given linked in access to my email contacts, but he had and linked in was just waiting for me to show up to tell me. He was super surprised that linked in knew we knew each other and was equally surprised that linked in knew he knew an old college friend so while having given linked in the access he was totally surprised by the result. So, all this to say that some people who are very smart, don't quite realize all the buttons and things they are clicking and it does then figure out stuff about me (or you) based on others choices.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Adam! I just used that.
ReplyDeleteThe blog people may have come up through one or two people being email contact links (on the same email list as you, in a third person's account), and then Facebook noting that those people have mutually friended some other people (including blog commenters), and so Facebook is suggesting the blog commenters to you as possible mutual friends.
ReplyDeleteIt may also help to have your privacy settings turned up high. Mine are set so that no one can search for me by name - now the only friend requests I get are from people who have several mutual friends in common (mainly people from high school), so Facebook suggests me to them. I've never had any work contacts come up.
Related: http://xkcd.com/792/
ReplyDeleteEven so, I was siding with Larry Summers in that scene.
ReplyDeleteHow about "can I sell you a list of person x's contacts"? That would be pretty bad.
ReplyDeleteYeah, what's he supposed to do? Suspend a guy because he upset a couple of legacies? If the Winkelvi had hired an IP lawyer (say, Matt) to seek an injunction the moment Facebook launched, they might have won. That would have been the correct tactical choice. But in retrospect, it also would have been the wrong strategic choice, because one of the two possibilities would have had Facebook ceasing to exist in favor of ConnectU, which probably would never have been worth the $65MM that they got. The other possibility would have been that they would have received a share of FB and sank ConnectU, which might or might not have made them a fortune, depending upon whether they left Zuckerberg with enough of an incentive to do what he ultimately did.
ReplyDeleteThe creepiest thing FB has done to me so far in the friend suggestion department is to repeatedly prompt me to add an old friend of my father's. This is creepy because:
ReplyDeleteMy father is not on FB at all.
The old friend has exactly 3 friends on FB, and I recognize none of them as acquaintances of my father.
We have not spoken in decades.
He has never sent me an email (but likely corresponds with my father now and again).
The only FB check-box item of information the old friend and I have in common is a hometown.
That FB is leveraging third party information that he and I have not specifically authorized them to access seems like the only explanation. [If he had given email contact access to FB, he would have accrued more than three friends. (He's fairly gregarious.) I have not given email contact access to FB. My father cannot have done so as he is not a subscriber.] I imagine that the what-where-how of it all would get complicated very quickly, and I have no doubt that the information is out there -- and well out of our control.
Creepy, yes, but FB isn't the creepiest part of it. With FB in our lives we have an interface surface -- a visible guage of sorts -- a proxy -- to suggest how much information about us is now being mined for use and with what degree of success. It should give us all pause, because it is only the tiniest sanitized tip of the iceberg.
Twenty years from now, automated services will be churning our pseudonymous blog commenting histories and predicting whether and how our children are going to vote. They will do so for a profit, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and at a surprising level of granular detail (without disclosing user-identifying information, as defined in relevant stats and regs, natch).
I guess that would fall into my "deceptive practices" exception, right? I don't find it to be particularly skeevy, but I can see why others might.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say Summers made the wrong choice. I'd just say that he was almost surely less of a pompous dick about it -- even given how much of a pompous dick we all suspect Summers to be.
ReplyDeleteI just love that the boys had a more capacious understanding of the president of Harvard's jurisdiction than the president of Harvard. Is there anything more privileged than assuming the president of Harvard can fix what ails you?
ReplyDelete