Facebook Question

[Californio]

I am not a member of Facebook but I get this invite to join from a friend at my Hotmail email account, yes I know this person. At the bottom of the page are two other people that I might know shown. It happens that they are both LEO's, involved in the Automotive Hobby and the person sending the email does not know them. How is Facebook getting this information. I have emailed both LEO's from Hotmail but Facebook should not know this. Does Facebook steal info in your contacts list when you open an Invite and cross-reference with their members list?

[Fjold]

They don't steal it. it part of their "Terms of use"

[dragonbait1a]

Facebook can only access your data when you sign up for FB and use the "find friends" feature that asks for your email and password. HOWEVER, The two friends could have done this, and your name/email popped up in their account and that data was accessed when the third friend specifically invited you.

It's "The Gang's all here" advertising.

And FB excels at data mining. I'm more concerned about them then Google.

RGB

[Californio]

Sounds like another reason for Social Networking Face-to-Face only

[vahtryn]

It's pretty simple, and like dragonbait1a stated, that's probably how you ended up there. When you sign up for facebook you can have it log into various services to search your "contacts" or friends through there, and if they are apart of facebook you'll get requests.

This is all part of the whole web 2.0 social infrastructure that is going on right now. It happened before, it's just more prevalent now because more people are using these applications as desk top applications slowly die off and end up into the "cloud."

I'm a cloud engineer (dumb name I know) so I can see the value of moving away from expensive computers that do more than you actually need and onto smaller, diskless, machines. One of the big things I tried to push as a government contractor was a cloud solution (well before that was even an idea) and to use thin clients to access anything within the network. Of course back then they didn't see the cost savings it would have made (and these are your tax dollars at work, thank you federal government).

Social mediums such as facebook, or twitter, aren't a bad thing as long as you keep in mind that there may be hacks, or you may leak too much information about yourself onto the internet. So always keep a mind about how much you're putting out there. Always make sure your privacy settings are set to what you want them to. Most of all, tend to use an alias or have a very common name. These are all things that can make it hard to steal your information.

A possible employer can search for my name (legal, and nick name) and I don't show up on the radar. I don't use my personal email "address" for sending out resumes so searching that comes up with nothing as well. There are plenty of ways not to worry about this. Facebook just uses the data that it has mined to figure out who else you might possibly know, or may be interested in meeting. This really isn't that bad of a thing.

Keep your passwords secure, and your computers up to date and you should be fine. If you run windows make sure your license is up to date. Pirating it will just cause you issues down the line. Even better install something like Ubuntu or go the OS X route. These operating systems, while have their own security flaws, are not targeted as much as any version of windows there is out there.

I could go on and on, but I think I'll stop there. I can really get on tangents when it comes to data mining, the cloud, and network security.

[JDay]

Facebook can only access your data when you sign up for FB and use the "find friends" feature that asks for your email and password. HOWEVER, The two friends could have done this, and your name/email popped up in their account and that data was accessed when the third friend specifically invited you.

It's "The Gang's all here" advertising.

And FB excels at data mining. I'm more concerned about them then Google.

RGB

Amazingly, Facebook added an option to actually delete your account instead of just deactivating it the other day.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/07/26/1240257/Facebook-Adds-Delete-Account-Option

[den888]

In a nutshell, data mining. I joined Facebook in Dec 2007 and 2 ladies that I dated before I got married showed up on the Facebook page "People You May Know".

[JDay]