Anyone know how they come up with these? I was always under the impression that the program looked at all your friends and found common people in them and then listed them as "Possible Friends". I have always been able to click on these potential friends and find out who the common links were.

But this guy, who happens to be my landlord's son, continually pops up as a person I might know. He is not my friends with anyone I know, and I have never actually met him, yet somehow Facebook knows I might know this dude. Kinda weird.

8/21/2009 8:36:52 PM

do I look like a fucking facebook expert?

8/21/2009 8:38:53 PM

ip addresses?

8/21/2009 8:39:07 PM

Facebook wants you to feel important so they bring up random people in your area. Just further proof that Facebook is trying to take over the world

8/21/2009 8:39:19 PM

you must have friends in common

kinda like google, when you search for something

....

duh?

8/21/2009 8:39:48 PM

No you look like someone who really likes to suck cock. I just thought perhaps Facebook was a side interest you might have that I did not know about.

8/21/2009 8:40:22 PM

SPOT ON

8/21/2009 8:41:21 PM

Hmmmm the IP address thing might be it. We do get free internet, and it is very possible that before we got here he hooked up to the modem (although it is password protected now.)

8/21/2009 8:41:36 PM

If he (or his father using one of his accounts) has ever sent you an email or IM then it could have tracked it that way.

Shit's scary.

8/21/2009 8:43:37 PM

The dude at one point probably sent you an email to the address on your facebook account. When he signed up, he let facebook go through his emails to find friends.

8/21/2009 8:51:51 PM

^possible

or by IP. i thought they didn't store anything they retrieved from when you gave them your login info for an email account in order to check for friends. maybe i remember wrong and it just meant they don't remember the login details

8/21/2009 8:54:50 PM

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I seriously doubt IP addresses have anything to do with this at all.

8/21/2009 8:56:07 PM

that would indeed be a little

to say the least

8/21/2009 8:58:15 PM

IIRC the only one I had was basically a friend I had accepted from high school who put forth the suggestion of another person I had known during high school too. I guess it's a button option that a user can use to forward the friend suggestion to their accepted friends but I've never seen it.

8/21/2009 9:10:30 PM

I don't know how it works but it is indeed creepy. It continuously suggests that I add a friend who is a member of the same flying club as me. I've been flying with him once but never talked to him through email and we have no friends in common. It also did this with a girl that I spoke with briefly online through a dating site like 5 months ago.

8/21/2009 9:14:16 PM

i get a lot of people who are all friends of friends. which is nice and all, but i can't always recognize them.

they should make users have a face shot to be listed in the "suggested friends" profile...

8/21/2009 9:17:03 PM

i have no idea

it has started suggesting family members who i do not want to friend
but i have no friends or anything in common with them...



[Edited on August 21, 2009 at 9:38 PM. Reason : they are also nowhere near my area and have never emailed me]

8/21/2009 9:36:30 PM

This dude from a reality show that I emailed a few years back added me.

The funny thing is, the email I emailed him from isn't associated with my profile anywhere.

I guess he could have searched me but there's like 6 or 7 people with my name so he would have had to add them all.

8/22/2009 10:24:24 AM

I think you are all over-analyzing this...


The dude clicked on your profile at some point in time. He didn't add you. This is Facebook's way of saying "This person has shown that he may know you and we suggest that you think about adding him".

Or if you clicked his profile whenever ago but didn't add him, he may pop up 6 months later as a suggested friend. LinkedIn does this on their suggested contacts. It will suggest contacts to be added based on a question they asked that I answered 3 months prior.

8/22/2009 11:03:59 AM

i wish it just threw out really tight chicks all the time

8/22/2009 11:06:21 AM

Markov Chains

The same thing that suggests amazon products or google pageranks


That'd be my guess

8/22/2009 12:13:25 PM

they do same network on occasion, ill get random people working at duke or that went to/go to ncsu

8/22/2009 12:14:00 PM

I think they get the suggested friends from a number of things.

For instance, I know that friends of friends will be suggested.

I know that, for whatever reason, my father was constantly suggested to me as a friend. I have never friended him and he was suggested to me even when we had no mutual friends. I don't like him at all, so his name is in nothing of mine except that I sent him an email years ago on google.

That brings me to my next point:

It is painfully apparent that facebook acquires information like that. People on your gmail (Nothing you generate, just a list of all the people you've emailed) are suggested as friends. Facebook obviously takes all of this info from you and then uses it to advertise to you and get you to go deeper into their services. It's kind of scary man. Note that I have never selected to upload any information from an email account into facebook.

8/22/2009 12:28:17 PM

So you're implying that facebook somehow gains access to your gmail account and gets your information? That is pretty dubious and probably illegal, though I agree the 'suggested friends' thing is creepy as hell.

It has started showing my landlord in suggested friends even though I have never contacted him through facebook and we have no friends in common. I was freaked out for a while, but like someone mentioned it probably means that he tried to facebook me to check me out before I got the lease. (of course I've got a near total privacy block on anyone not friends and a search block outside the ncsu network)

8/22/2009 12:41:45 PM

Quote :

"So you're implying that facebook somehow gains access to your gmail account and gets your information? That is pretty dubious and probably illegal......."

No, not exactly. But somehow it is recognizing email addresses in facebook accounts that match those on my email list and suggesting them as friends. I am almost positive that this is where it's getting the info because people I've emailed that I don't even know personally have popped up in there. Couldn't it possibly get this info through your cookies or something else? Facebook HAS to be getting this info from you somehow and it is not info I ever entered into Facebook. If it was just that my dad and I shared the same last name then I'd have other suggestions besides him with that last name, but I don't! I hate him, so he's not someone I talk to or would even consider adding to my friends list. He has been emailed before though and the address I used is the address he has entered in for his facebook account.

Sorry guys, I am so stupid that I wasn't born with the knowledge that this is the only way they could get the info.


Now, let me ask you this:

When you enter in your email address on facebook, do you think that part of the agreement you electronically sign allows them to retrieve that information?

8/22/2009 12:47:38 PM

Quote :

"Could it get this through cookies? "

no. that's why he suggested you were implying they are accessing your email, cus it's the only way they would be able to access that information.

i'm sure they have sophisticated enough algorithms to suggest connections that would not be immediately apparent (or relevant for that matter though)

[Edited on August 22, 2009 at 12:52 PM. Reason : .]

8/22/2009 12:50:58 PM

Facebook wants you to feel important so they bring up random people in your area. Just further proof that Facebook is trying to take over the world

I'm AstralAdvent and i approved this message.

8/22/2009 12:51:14 PM

Quote :

"no. that's why he suggested you were implying they are accessing your email, cus it's the only way they would be able to access that information. i'm sure they have sophisticated enough algorithms to suggest connections that would not be immediately apparent (or relevant for that matter though)"

Cool son. Can you answer the second question I posed after the edit?

I'm not a computer nerd and I don't care about programming, cookies or other bullshit honestly. So I'm not trying to be some bad ass, I just don't believe it randomly figured out all of these people on my address list.

8/22/2009 12:54:07 PM

the only way they can legitimately access your email contacts list is if you voluntarily do it at

http://www.facebook.com/find-friends/

furthermore, they claim to not store your password for future use, though there is no way to verify this and imo, this sets a VERY BAD precedent, as it leads uninformed users to believe that freely giving your password to sites that ask for it is a safe practice, which is certainly is not.

Quote :

"We will not store your password after we import your friends' information. We may use the email addresses you upload through this importer to help you connect with friends, including using this information to generate Suggestions for you and your contacts on Facebook. If you don't want us to store this information, visit this page."

the email that you sign in to facebook with, they have no rights to access or means through which to access it.






this is the same reason why you should never give your tww password to a third party, whether it's myself, evan, froshkiller, or anybody else who is providing a meaningful service.

[Edited on August 22, 2009 at 12:59 PM. Reason : .]

8/22/2009 12:55:08 PM

Right, I've seen that and that's why I said I've never entered the addresses in there or anything.

As far as "accessing it", I think we're thinking about two very different things. I'm thinking they can get this information from google, not that they're like "signing in to my account" or something.

But since you know, for a fact, that it is impossible for them to have obtained that info, I must have given it to them by accident in my sleep or, the most likely scenario: I'm just an idiot.

8/22/2009 12:56:46 PM

Quote :

"I'm thinking they can get this information from google, not that they're like "signing in to my account" or something. "

getting anybody's contacts list from google requires the equivalent of signing into their google account. google provides a Contacts API, so that other programs (like facebook) have a means through which to access that information, given the user's consent. the different here is that with the API, the authentication goes through google's servers, so you're signing into google and then google says "ok facebook, this person is legit and says you can read their Contacts list and only their Contact list. here it is." that way you're not giving facebook your google password directly. the way facebook has it set up now is like "ok give us your google password, we'll log into your account and read your contacts, and we promise we won't keep your password or do anything else to your account now that we have complete access to it"

8/22/2009 1:04:35 PM

Quote :

"Just further proof that Facebook is trying to take over the world"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOfgUVpb1WA

8/22/2009 2:11:45 PM

Quote :

"The dude clicked on your profile at some point in time. He didn't add you. This is Facebook's way of saying "This person has shown that he may know you and we suggest that you think about adding him"."

Saab my son, I'm thinking that your father probably clicked your profile at some time. More reasonable than Facebook accessing email...

8/22/2009 10:56:23 PM

They also look at pictures....they know I'm fat cause they keep telling me that I need to become a fan of chocolate chip cookies.

8/22/2009 11:02:06 PM

hahah

8/22/2009 11:04:24 PM

haha thats messed up

8/22/2009 11:05:09 PM

Quote :

"Saab my son, I'm thinking that your father probably clicked your profile at some time. More reasonable than Facebook accessing email..."

Except that I only opened it because DDK asked me to, but he IMMEDIATELY popped up as did everyone else I'm talking about. This was before I even had a single friend besides her. I only had the account for a few weeks total actually, but he came up immediately.

It surprised me greatly, but I mean, it's probable that some other thing happened to allow it to figure that out obviously. I'm sure it wasn't that it signed into my google account, I never thought it did that (Read my initial posts...).

8/22/2009 11:20:40 PM

Quote :

"It is painfully apparent that facebook acquires information like that. People on your gmail (Nothing you generate, just a list of all the people you've emailed) are suggested as friends. Facebook obviously takes all of this info from you and then uses it to advertise to you and get you to go deeper into their services. It's kind of scary man. Note that I have never selected to upload any information from an email account into facebook."

There are two people that keep popping up as suggestions. The only thing common is that we have sent e-mail to one another via gmail.

The 1st one was for something I bought off of craig's list. The other was an alumni rep that I contacted about a game watch while traveling on business.

No other connections whatsoever.

8/23/2009 2:38:23 AM

facebook is like desperate to get me to add some dude who works for my company in ohio. it recommends this guy at least half the time i'm on fb, and in like 4 different suggestion styles. i don't know this dude plz

8/24/2009 9:43:16 AM

My grandmother is on FB and has exactly one friend, some lady I don't know. Somehow, though, she's always in the recommended friend box on the home page and it kind of freaks me out.

8/24/2009 10:09:31 AM

ok...here is one for you.

I have never used Facebook's contact importer.

Under my friend suggestions, there is a person that has popped up. I have emailed this person using an outlook client, but never with my personal email. We have no mutual friends and I have never searched for this person.

The common thread is the industry that we are in. He is a design engineer and I am a contractor.

It could possibly be mutual friends of friends, but that is really far fetched considering I have less than 5% of work related friends.

[Edited on August 24, 2009 at 10:30 AM. Reason : .]

8/24/2009 10:29:58 AM

Quote :

"i'm sure they have sophisticated enough algorithms to suggest connections that would not be immediately apparent (or relevant for that matter though)"

he may have searched for you at one point. also, social graph theory can find a lot of stuff, especially considering you've probably already added the most relevant people. the only suggestions left are the ones that have a lower chance of being relevant, but there was still some connection that the social graph exposed

8/24/2009 11:17:59 AM

One of my relatives supposedly is working with a company that is doing work on Facebook, and says that it actually goes into your computer and searches your email contact lists.

That would explain why my professor from a summer program at Louisiana Tech added me, when we had 0 mutual friends when he added me...and he's in fucking Louisiana.

8/24/2009 11:20:55 AM

Quote :

"it actually goes into your computer and searches your email contact lists."

i really really really doubt that. it shouldn't even be technically possible, and even if it was, if it ever became public that facebook was actually doing this, there would be a horrendous backlash

8/24/2009 11:54:05 AM

A girl from Chapel Hill that I bought a car from over three years ago popped up on the suggested friends box. I never gave Facebook access to my e-mail account. Maybe she gave them access to hers or something?

8/24/2009 11:54:40 AM