If you know someone on Facebook, Facebook knows you…
It's becoming almost impossible to hide from the network...
It turns out that Facebook’s mapping of the world’s social connections goes beyond even its 500 million+ members.
In an interesting little experiment, the BBC’s Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones demonstrates that it knows a fair bit about you even if you haven’t signed up yet.
He sets up a profile for a friend who has not used Facebook at all before and it suggests friends based on existing members who have emailed her before.
You can read more about the experiment on Rory’s blog.
This actually solves, or confirms the solution to something that puzzled me for a while. I’d done some PR work a long time ago for a private individual some years ago and Facebook kept suggesting that I should be their friend, and yet there were no connections at all in our networks.
After a while I realised that my webmail account which I log into Facebook with was most likely where the service was able to make the connection. Still it felt eery.
Rory also points out that this shows how it is possible to to set up a profile for somone without your actual permission – another example of online identity theft risk.
The moral of the story? As I say in the second rule of Me and My Web Shadow: Be the best and first source of information about yourself. That means even if you don’t want to be an active Facebook user, you should establish your online profile so that people can find you.
Facebook is increasingly being used as a kind of form of identification online now for other web services too, so securing your Facebook profile should really be part of guarding your online identity.
And after all, if Facebook knows who you are and who you know anyway, what’s the point in staying off of the network?
