Do you want to become Facebook
friends with the other patients at your therapist’s office? If you
don’t, it’s a good idea to avoid giving Facebook your telephone number.
That’s
the takeaway from a disturbing news report that looks at how
Facebook finds those “People You May Know” who mysteriously appear in
your Facebook feed.
The report, published on news site Fusion,
describes how a psychotherapist in a small town began to see her
patients pop up as suggestions when she went on Facebook. Worse, one of
those patients, a 30-something snowboarder, asked her why a bunch of
random 60-something people had shown up in his feed--he guessed
(correctly) that they must be connected through the therapist’s office.
This
raises obvious privacy implications. As the therapist noted, her
patients included people with serious diseases or suicidal tendencies.
Would they be comfortable with Facebook suggesting them as friends to
the therapist’s other patients?
There’s also the question of how
Facebook connected these people in the first place. The most obvious
answer, noted by Fusion, is the social media giant used the telephone
contacts of the therapist to guess the patients were connected.
A
Facebook spokesperson would not confirm or deny that the phone number
was the source of the common connections, and provided this statement
instead:
“Without additional information from the
people involved, we’re not able to explain why one person was
recommended as a friend to another. People You May Know is based on a
variety of factors, including mutual friends, work and education
information, networks you're part of, contacts you've imported and many
other factors.”
© Provided by Fortune
Popular Smart Phone Apps Of 2016
While the company makes a valid point that phone numbers
are not the only piece of data used to suggest common friends, in the
case of the therapist, it’s hard to point to any other explanation.
One way to avoid such situations, of course, is to avoid giving Facebook your phone number in the first place.
Link Here.