Facebook recommends that psychiatric patients befriend each other. How did he know?

Photo: Erendira Mancias / Fusion

Facebook’s ability to find people “you may know” sometimes surprises. Well, if this is a person with whom you have many common acquaintances. But when Facebook recommends a former colleague from a job where you haven’t been working for 15 years - what is it? The place of work is not indicated in the profile and there are no mutual friends on Facebook. Or - suddenly - a girl with whom you once met and never saw each other again. How does he know about her?

It is clear that Facebook takes into account not only common friends, but much more. We can only guess how this function works, which cannot be disabled in the settings.

As usual, Facebook help does not provide complete information. It says only that in the section “People you may know” (People You May Know) “people are shown on the basis of the fact that you have mutual friends, the information about education or place of work is the same, you are in some communities, and also based on contacts imported through the friend search function, and many other factors. ”
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“Many other factors” is a very broad formulation. Given the vast array of personal data that Facebook collects, one can assume anything. A social network can even compare a list of favorite sites, because Facebook registers the names of visitors to all sites with the Like and Share buttons. Just look at the 98 targeting parameters that Facebook offers to its advertisers for targeted advertising in order to understand the unprecedented scale of user profiling.

Charming journalist Kashmir Hill, editor of Fusion, spoke about one amazing case that is generally out of the ordinary, even with the powerful features of Facebook.

A woman who works as a psychiatrist contacted the journalist (she is called Lisa, this is a different name). Lisa rarely logs in to Facebook, mainly to respond to a request for participation in an event. But last summer, she noticed that Facebook began to recommend her as new friends ... her own patients.

The woman explained that she did not send her address or phone books to Facebook, much less imported contacts from the email inbox. That is completely unclear how Facebook figured out these people.

Lisa's patients are mostly elderly people with various health problems, but there is one exception - a snowboarder of more than 30 years. It was he who, with a laugh, told his doctor a funny story about what friends Facebook recommends to him. Often these are strangers, outdoor enthusiasts of similar age, who snowboard or jump with a parachute. But lately, the guy has been increasingly receiving advice to make friends with some strange old men - there was a 70-year-old elderly gentleman with a rollator (trolley on wheels to facilitate walking) and another elderly man suffering from cerebral palsy. A funny snowboarder jokingly suggested: “Maybe these are your patients?”. The doctor could only stare at the phone screen, because she really recognized her patients in these people, but did not have the right to admit it in order not to violate medical secrecy.

How did Facebook know about them?

Options disappear one by one. Lisa says she didn't add any of her patients as a friend. The guest WiFi doesn’t work in her office, so that patients couldn’t be noted here. When she found out that Facebook was experimenting with the recommendation of her geolocation friends , she suggested that this could be the reason. Facebook saw that certain users often appear in the same place - it means they can become friends. But representatives of the Facebook company assured that the experimental function ran around the city for a small number of users. The experiment lasted only four weeks at the end of 2015 and has already been completed (thank God).

True, there are some doubts in the veracity of the words of Facebook, because too often it offers to friends of people who have recently met in real life.

But in an official comment for Slashdot , Facebook representatives reaffirmed that the company “does not use location data, such as phone coordinates and location information that you add to your profile, to guess people you may know. We can show people based on information about mutual friends, information about the place of work and education, your communities, imported contacts and other factors. ”

Facebook was unable to respond to Kashmir Hill’s journalistic request and clarify “without additional information about people recommended as friends,” but the psychiatrist refused to disclose their personal data.

We can only assume how Facebook figured out these people. According to Kashmir Hill, the most likely version is in the social graph, compiled on the basis of telephone numbers from the list of contacts in the phone. Many people do not understand that Facebook has access to their contacts if the phone has the Facebook mobile application installed. Thus, if there are people in your contact list who are not familiar with each other, then Facebook can, theoretically, invite them to meet.

The doctor believes that there is a clear violation of medical secrecy by Facebook. For example, one of her patients received recommendations as a friend of the person she saw on the stairs near the doctor's office. And the social network helpfully prompted his name, along with all the other information from the profile. The doctor says that among her patients are people living with HIV, attempting suicide, suffering from domestic violence. You can not just offer them to make friends with each other.

Surprisingly, many users still do not know that Facebook bought WhatsApp and very soon their phone books from their smartphone will add to the social graph of Facebook, even if the phone does not have the Facebook mobile application installed. Users have only a few days left to cancel the terms of the new WhatsApp user agreement (the new conditions are offered with the latest update of the program).

Kashmir Hill does not know how to solve the problem in the particular case of Lisa. Her medical institution now recommends that patients who are concerned about the protection of confidential data should not log in to Facebook or other social media accounts while in a medical facility, but it’s best to leave the phone in the car before meeting with the doctor. Good advice, but this is clearly not enough to hide from the caring supervision of Big Blue Brother.

All this seems nonsense, but only until such time as Facebook advises your wife to meet your mistress.

And if you don’t have them, then smart enough Facebook can pick them up.