Facebook used location data for its "find friends" algorithm:

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...n-data-not-now

... but denied it for awhile.


I can tell you that the "find friends" thing is creepier than it appears.

The biggest example of this came at the expense of a girl I knew from back in the 90s. One day it gave me a "People You Might Know" suggestion for someone who looked a hell of a lot like her, yet the name was different.

I clicked through, and found that it was a fetish porn profile. I didn't talk to this girl much anymore -- in fact it had been years -- but the last time we messaged each other, she gave me some story about a great career in real estate she had. Turned out that was all a lie. In reality, she was doing fetish porn -- not having sex on camera or getting fully nude, but doing foot fetish, food fetish, and other type videos like that for a living. She had never told a soul from her "real life" about her fetish porn identity.

I found out how secret it all was because I contacted her and advised her to kill that profile. If it suggested her to me -- someone who has been just a casual acquaintance for the past 20+ years -- I could only imagine how many others in her life would get the same suggestion.

But she couldn't understand it. Apparently she didn't have the password to that profile, and never created it. The porn label created and operated it. She never once used it. Therefore, she asked, how could it have possibly associated her with me?

We couldn't figure it out, but my only theory was that perhaps at some point she mentioned having known "poker pro Todd Witteles", and maybe they looked me up on the same computer used to create the porn profile. But she didn't remember doing that.

Anyway, apparently those videos were old, and she didn't work with that company anymore, so she had no power to delete the profile. I never bothered asking what happened after that.

I promised not to tell anyone we both knew about it.

But yes, Facebook does save information of who you look up on there (even from a different account on the same IP or computer), and then suggests you as a friend to that person sometime in the future. It doesn't always do this, but it does sometimes.

So if you think you're spying on your ex from 1995 without her knowing, think again.