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Facebook Is Using Your Phone's Location To Suggest New Friends (fusion.net) 140

Posted by msmash from the privacy-woes dept.
Fusion's Kashmir Hill is reporting that Facebook is using your phone's location to suggest new friends. It's unclear exactly when the social juggernaut began doing this, but a number of instances suggest it only started recently. From the report:Last week, I met a man who suspected Facebook had tracked his location to figure out who he was meeting with. He was a dad who had recently attended a gathering for suicidal teens. The next morning, he told me, he opened Facebook to find that one of the anonymous parents at the gathering popped up as a "person you may know." [...] "People You May Know are people on Facebook that you might know," a Facebook spokesperson said. "We show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you're part of, contacts you've imported and many other factors." One of those factors is smartphone location. A Facebook spokesperson said though that shared location alone would not result in a friend suggestion, saying that the two parents must have had something else in common, such as overlapping networks.While this feature could be useful in some cases, many may -- and they should -- see it as a big invasion of their privacy -- Hill has succinctly explained a number of them.
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Facebook Is Using Your Phone's Location To Suggest New Friends More

Facebook Is Using Your Phone's Location To Suggest New Friends

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  • OH FUCK (Score:5, Funny)

    by Captain Splendid ( 673276 ) <`capsplendid' `at' `gmail.com'> on Monday June 27, 2016 @03:11PM (#52401181) Homepage Journal
    "The friend request is coming FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!"

  • That's amazing! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by msauve ( 701917 )
    "Facebook is using your phone's location to suggest new friends."

    How does it do that? I don't have a Facebook account, nor a Facebook app on my phone.

    Just say "no" to the Bookface.

    • Re:That's amazing! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by EkriirkE ( 1075937 ) on Monday June 27, 2016 @04:04PM (#52401587) Homepage
      I'f you have an unrooted android phone with Facebook as one of the irremoveable bloatwares, it collects information in the background and transmits regularly despite you never having opened it, or signed in

      • Good lord, who wouldn't root their phone if FB was on it?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        If that's true, there's probably a lot of lawsuit money to be made from Facebook (and/or the mfg/carrier who put it on there) by those who've never agreed to any sort of TOU which allows that.

        • Now I'm waiting for man sues facebook after random girls that shop in the same mall start showing up on his facebook account as people he might know and wife cuts off his private parts.

    • I'm very anti-social. I collect friends at about one per decade, I'd have to stay inside all of the time.

    • Your personal number could be uploaded to them like 200 times along with all your correspondence (calls, messages) because your friends and relatives uses their application and messenger. Yes, they ask before uploading all the information and yes, people allow it.

      It is just like getting lung cancer from second hand smoking as I bet people not having Facebook accounts are more precious to them, they must be digging deeper.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by agm ( 467017 )

      And if you did, why would you let this app have access to your location? I don't let any apps other than maps and cycling apps have my location.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      There are probably one or more "phantom accounts" of you, created when you visit sites with the api, when people talk about you on fb etc etc etc..

  • uninstall the facebook app (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27, 2016 @03:13PM (#52401193)

    uninstall the facebook app and use the browser instead

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Exactly - and be sure to use all the iphone or android restriction settings to control app behavior, including for the browser since it's still an app.
    • I found a great app called Metal. Its on the Play Store and uses about 10MB. A far cry from the 400MB official app.

    • uninstall the facebook app

      Should have stopped there.

      • I have never used the FB app on ANY of my phones, yet yesterday a person I met via craigslist (and had absolutely NO other connections to) appeared on my FB suggestions. In fact, that particular FB account has NO friends on it at all (just as an experiment.) The person never used my wifi or anything, and GPS is always turned off on my own phone. Creepy.

  • It's Satan's fault! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Satan is holding a contest between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle to see which company can be most evil. At present, unusually, Microsoft is trailing. Microsoft is not so much evil as just stupid.

    • Satan is holding a contest between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle.... At present, unusually, Microsoft is trailing

      No, Microsoft are so far ahead that the commentators have lost interest in it; the newcomers to the race are just more interesting.

  • Who could object to this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27, 2016 @03:16PM (#52401237)

    This would be a great way to get to know the full identities of the other fun members of your AA group.

    • That's nothing... (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's suggesting that I friend the creepy guy outside in the bushes...

      • That's me! I'm STILL waiting for you to respond to my friend request! (Back in my day, we didn't have any Facebook like you spoiled kids. If we wanted to stalk somebody, we had to actually go over to their house and hide in the bushes!)

  • Yup (Score:5, Informative)

    by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Monday June 27, 2016 @03:18PM (#52401253) Homepage

    I noticed this a few months back. I noticed that I was getting a lot more friend suggestions of people that I didn't know, which was the first thing that made me curious. Facebook had always been suggesting that I friend people when I had mutual friends with that person, but suddenly it was suggesting that I friend people that I didn't recognize, and with whom I shared no mutual friends. So I started paying a bit more attention.

    Then I noticed that, among the random strangers, there were a few people that I did know but did not have any mutual Facebook friends and hadn't checked in at the same locations or anything else. That was my first tip-off that Facebook was trying to do something clever to link up friends, so I scanned the suggestions again looking for a possible pattern. Then I noticed that some of the strangers looked familiar. It took me a second to place them, but they were people who lived in the same apartment building or worked in the same office building. In some cases, it was people who lived in a nearby apartment building and got coffee from the same place that I did.

    They're definitely using location data to match people up. My only question is whether it's tracking your location all the time, only when the app is open, or only when you post.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I noticed it months ago when I got friend requests for client employees, people I only knew by face or first name in passing. The biggest clue was when our nanny started showing up as a potential friend.

      I noticed that iOS has a location right for "use your location all the time" or "use your location only when using the app" and mine for Facebook had been set to "all the time".

      I switched it to "only when using the app" and have gotten fewer suggestions that feel geographically related.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I keep my FB profile in Paranoid mode, I have only 4-5 'friends' on there, privacy settings maxed (I only use it because my wife loves the thing). Suddenly about 3-4 months ago, all my co-workers and our clients started being suggested. I don't have the FB app on my phone, as far as I know I've never let them know my phone number. It deeply creeped me out.

  • Facebook uses your phone's location to (Score:3)

    by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Monday June 27, 2016 @03:20PM (#52401269)
    do everything they want to.

  • Since oooh 2012 or so they did IP for ISPs (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It recommends also based on login IP. So you get your neighbors even though you have never met them.

  • I've been wondering why FB was suggesting so many agents as friends...

    Be right back, someone's knocking at my door.

  • Facebook Is Using Your Phone's Location To Suggest New Friends

    Facebook isn't using my phone to do anything. These shitty clickbait headlines are getting everywhere. Some of us are capable of being interested in things without having to have them directly linked to our own personal wellbeing.

    • These shitty clickbait headlines are getting everywhere. Some of us are capable of being interested in things without having to have them directly linked to our own personal wellbeing.

      But incapable of not commenting to that effect. Now hold up, I need to go tell someone I don't have a TV.

  • It had to be in the last update to the iOS app on June 24th. I was very recently traveling with a group of people who all carried smartphones, but we never shared any information, photos or tagged each other. Basically, all communications were off the grid between us.

    When I returned from my trip, several of the people from the group were in the "People you may know" section.

  • TFA even tells you how to turn off Facebook's ability to use your location data.

    Choices. Knowledge. I believe it's still opt-in. Is it not?

  • Being on Facebook... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Monday June 27, 2016 @03:37PM (#52401405)

    ... and bitching about invasion of privacy is a little hypocritical.

  • There's a word [oxymoronlist.com] for that...

  • I only turn on location access for the Facebook app (and my web browser) when I travel, so right now it thinks I'm about 2,200 miles away from where I actually am...

  • I don't know what you guys are rambling on about, I see an opportunity to not be swindled by those w4m "$ervice$". F*c*book, quit slacking and gimme my updated list of potential "friend$" already!
  • Last year I was dropping my daughter off at a friend's house. The friend's dad met me at the door and we chatted. It was the first time that we had ever talked about anything. Literally just met the guy. In our conversation, we mentioned an app that he just started using (and was in fact using when I pulled up). It's an app that I would never use since it was about Golf and I don't play or care about golf. Before I pulled out of his driveway I checked Facebook. I kid you not, an ad for that app was on my news feed. I'd never seen it before, ever. Somehow they correlated his installation of the app, with my account, and showed me something that there was a chance we discussed. Twilight Zone stuff, I tell you.

  • GPS can be faked (Score:5, Interesting)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Monday June 27, 2016 @04:16PM (#52401669)

    I use an app that puts out fake GPS data for other apps. They all think I hang out at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave all day.

  • Facebook would have to be pretty retarded to NOT have this obvious feature. I'd be rather shocked if it wasn't added a very long time ago.

  • You are the product, not the customer when it comes to facebook.

  • I'd like a friend in her 20s, maybe 30s, with big tits please?

  • Yet another reason I will never install their "Messenger" app on my phone

  • ...is deny it access to my contacts. And fight the fight over and over, because they won't take 'no' for an answer for very long.

    Along with some other privacy settings I keep having to remake. It's relentless, almost as bad as dealing with the U.S. Government.

    And yes, I reinstall FB occasionally on my Android devices, giving them an opportunity to sneak in those settings again. I notice they've moved the 'Most Recent' choice of listings further and further down the line, trying to convince me to accept t

  • For some reason, a bunch of strippers are know showing up as "People you may know" on my Facebook account!

    My teenage daughter says nobody uses Facebook anymore anyway, since all their parents are on it now...

  • I've got a patched facebook APK which gets rid of the location tracking crap, along with some other social crapware (and most ads). It's about one version old now, so it might nag you to update. The patches are a bitch to rebase, so I only do it every few versions. Warning- self-signed APK, so trust me at your own risk. http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~sm... [cmu.edu]

  • I can't say I'm surprised by this.

    Since I'm not interested in being notified every time someone messages me, I only access FB from a browser, even on my phone, and my browser does not have access to my location. This worked fine up until a couple of weeks ago when their mobile website stopped supporting messaging, instead popping up with a helpful advertisement to install the Facebook Messenger app.

    I downloaded it for fun and looked at the list of permissions it asked for - it was taller than my screen. M

  • To the facebook AI get access to the unprotected CCTV cameras around the world and go full "samaritan"?

  • Facebook has been suggesting my neighbors as friends for a few years now, I assume it's suggesting based on gps proximity, and has been for quite a while.

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