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Just signed up for Facebook with a rarely used email address, No phone number, They know all of my friends immediately

Posted by AndroidIosMagz

I heard (but I'm not sure) that Facebook makes "ghost profile" of people without an account by compiling data put by other users. Maybe these people has tagged you in pictures or status before.

Came to comment this. You are the missing node in the network until you appear and "confirm" their proposed connectedness.

I don't understand how Facebook could connect that ghost profile to OP, considering he says he has not accepted any friends.

Anybody with the Facebook app installed has likely forfeited the entirety of their phone's contact list, which could provide Facebook with plenty of data for a ghost profile.

You make it out as if it's sinister operation. It's not. When you install the app, it asks if you want to sync contacts. I imagine most people say yes because it's easy and useful. Now Facebook has a bunch of users each with op's email address. When OP creates his account, it suggests those people to him because it knows they know him. No ghost profile needed.

Facebook and Google may not be deliberately sinister in the way they have steadily eroded the entire concept of online privacy and anonymity for their own financial gain, but I think it's kind of insidious. These networks have become ubiquitous and nearly impossible to avoid if you're going to be a part of the first world and that's kind of fucked up in a lot of ways. I realize that people who grew up with broadband internet place a different value on privacy and don't seem to care that the giant corporations and government entities are increasingly able to leverage this technology for all kinds of unsavory things, but naïveté doesn't make it OK. This shit is already being used to categorize, label, market to and, yes, manipulate all of us more and more and there doesn't seem to be much anyone can (or maybe worse, wants to do about it. Opt out and you become an ever more alienated non-person who isn't a fully participating member of society. Opt in and you become a file in Google, Facebook and the NSA's databases for the rest of your existence and beyond.

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