Facebook Creep

On Friday, and again on Monday, Facebook told me that it uses smartphone location data to recommend new friends to its users.

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I was surprised, since this could lead to all kinds of negative outcomes—unmasking strangers, for instance, who wanted to stay anonymous at a gathering for alcoholics. Security technologist Ashkan Soltani pointed out that using shared phone location to figure out people’s real world associations was a technique used by the NSA, as revealed in 2013.

[...]

After I reported this, lots of people said that this explained why certain people had popped up in their “People You May Know” box on Facebook.

But on Monday night, after lots of negative feedback, Facebook reversed course. A spokesperson told me that the company had dug into the matter further and determined that “we’re not using location data, such as device location and location information you add to your profile, to suggest people you may know.”

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Facebook ran a test late last year that “temporarily” used location data for friend suggestions, but it was never rolled out to the general public.

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We do know that Facebook is using smartphone location for other things, such as tracking which stores you go to and geotargeting you with ads, but the social network now says it’s not using smartphone location to identify people you’ve been physically proximate to.

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There are other ways that they could divine this information beyond using your phone’s GPS coordinates, such as looking at shared use of a wireless network or looking at the IP address you are signing in from. IP addresses can be geographically mapped, sometimes precisely and sometimes imprecisely. The FTC recently fined a mobile advertising company $4 million because it was figuring out the location of people who had not given it location privileges by looking at the wireless networks they were near.

To know for sure, Facebook would need to spell out the “other factors” that go into their suggestions for people we may know. But for now, the company considers that proprietary information.

  Fusion

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.