How does Facebook get its info?
 

I recently signed up for F.B. (reluctantly) for class reunion purposes, and thought it was pretty limited. You have to log-in, strange format, it couldn't find either school page, then it automatically added it, and then the link disappeared.

I was shocked when the website asked for my email password for their "click though" option. Give them access to personal information? No way. There's enough (unfortunately legal) data-mining and lack of privacy out there.
Facebook: I don't know you, and I don't want to know you. We are not friends.

So I look at the "suggested friends" page, and listed is my mother-in-law, my realtor, and another co-owner at the condo.
How the heck do they get that stuff? Are they owned by Yahoo?

Facebook is a huge data-mining operation.

If you read the fine-print in most of their "apps", it allows them to sell the info to third parties.

Search for your last name. It looks through Facebook for people with the last name in your area first. Family are often the first hits. It knows your location, guesses your school, and your age gives your graduating year, and it uses that to suggest others. If you have a friend, it looks through their friends with similar activities, ages, locations etc. It also looks at your work history and cross references that with others who have worked in the same company etc. It's just a bunch of cross referencing. Facebook has no conscious hand in it. It's all a big database, that's it. The artificial intelligence is just that, artificial. You give up just as much info publically, but you just don't have as much access to it as easily. Why freak out over it?

They have access to your email address book. They can see through steel plates as well.

They mean no harm, play with them, its all good....

lol.

If that frightens you, don't start looking at the Footprints History app. They'll know where you are at any given time . . . I only know because my wife made me get a SPOT for an upcoming trip, and one of its abilities is an interface with FB through FireEagle (yahoo). Pretty neat, though. In a big brother sort of way . . .

One word: Linkedin.

-Z

J. Edgar Hoover must be rolling over in his grave with all this shlt!:cool: