#shadow profiles

In real life, in the natural course of conversation, it is not uncommon to talk about a person you may know. You meet someone and say, “I’m from Sarasota,” and they say, “Oh, I have a grandparent in Sarasota,” and they tell you where they live and their name, and you may or may not recognize them.

You might assume Facebook’s friend recommendations would work the same way: You tell the social network who you are, and it tells you who you might know in the online world. But Facebook’s machinery operates on a scale far beyond normal human interactions. And the results of its People You May Know algorithm are anything but obvious. In the months I’ve been writing about PYMK, as Facebook calls it, I’ve heard more than a hundred bewildering anecdotes:

A man who years ago donated sperm to a couple, secretly, so they could have a child—only to have Facebook recommend the child as a person he should know. He still knows the couple but is not friends with them on Facebook.

A social worker whose client called her by her nickname on their second visit, because she’d shown up in his People You May Know, despite their not having exchanged contact information.

A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.

An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”

Connections like these seem inexplicable if you assume Facebook only knows what you’ve told it about yourself. They’re less mysterious if you know about the other file Facebook keeps on you—one that you can’t see or control.

Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.

Once your smart devices can talk to you, who else are they talking to? Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu wanted to find out – so they outfitted Hill’s apartment with 18 different internet-connected devices and built a special router to track how often they contacted their servers and see what they were reporting back. The results were surprising – and more than a little bit creepy. Learn more about what the data from your smart devices reveals about your sleep schedule, TV binges and even your tooth-brushing habits – and how tech companies could use it to target and profile you. (This talk contains mature language.)

“Nachdem man die App installiert und die Einladung aktiviert hat, verlangt die App Zugriff auf sämtliche Einträge im Kontakte-Adressbuch des verwendeten iPhones. Wird dem zugestimmt, werden die Daten auch ohne das Wissen der Kontakte zu dem Anbieter hochgeladen. Diese Praxis wurde bei Whatsapp von Datenschützern in Europa heftig kritisiert, weil die Anwender eigentlich zuvor jeden einzelnen Kontakt um Erlaubnis fragen müssten, bevor die persönlichen Daten auf Server in den USA übertragen werden. Das Vorgehen hat mitunter seltsame Auswirkungen. So weist der ehemalige Chefredakteur von T3N, Stephan Dörner, auf Twitter darauf hin, dass zum Beispiel die ADAC Pannenhilfe bereits mehrere Tausend Freunde bei Clubhouse habe.“

Όλοι έχουμε ένα δεύτερο, “shadow profile” στο Facebook… και δεν το ξέρουμε

Πώς γίνεται να ξέρει το Facebook παλιούς συμμαθητές ή ανθρώπους που συναντήσαμε κάποια φορά σε μια παρέα; Και πόσο μέσα πέφτει όταν μας προτείνει ανθρώπους που μπορεί να ξέρουμε; (more…)

reminder2self:

i read a little about this online the other day:

they’re reluctant (fb is) to admit how easy it would be to enable anyone who wanted - to delete there complete profile -ie- wipe their info from the database... most likely because the profiles are how fb monetizes ...

can’t u just disconnect the nodes ? theoretically/conceptually sounds “easy”

an app that just makes all the nodes point/refer to null ... or something along thoz lines...

-or- like redirect the mapping of contacts & followers - for anyone who wanted to reassert their privacy ...

Klint Finley

Bob McMillan writes:

We already know that if you use an online social network, you give up a serious slice of your privacy thanks to the omnivorous way companies like Google and Facebook gather your personal data. But new academic research offers a glimpse of what these companies may be learning about people who don’t use their massive web services. And it’s a bit scary.

Because they couldn’t get their hands on data from the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn, the researchers studied publicly available data archived from an older social network, Friendster. They found that if Friendster had used certain state-of-the-art prediction algorithms, it could have divined sensitive information about non-members, including their sexual orientation. “At the time, it was possible for Friendster to predict the sexual orientation of people who did not have an account on Friendster,” says David Garcia, a postdoctoral researcher with Switzerland’s ETH Zurich university, who co-authored the study.

Full Story: Wired: Not on a Social Network? You’ve Still Got a Privacy Problem

This can be done through what are called “shadow profiles.” For example, if five of your friends invite you to join a new site called NeoSocial Company by punching your email address into a form on the site, the company could create a social graph based simply on your email address and who invited you, even if you don’t sign up for the service. They could even start to make some inferences about you based on what they know about your friends. Many sites also encourage you to upload your address book when you sign-up, so that i can help you connect with people you know who may already be using the service, or even to alert you if they sign-up later. If you do this, you could be helping these companies build shadow profiles of your contacts.

As Bob notes, an audit by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner confirmed that Facebook doesn’t keep shadow profiles. But the technical capability is always there, and we have no real idea what sites that haven’t been audited are doing. What’s more, law enforcement can build social network graphs based on seized address books and cell phones, or even metadata demanded from telephone companies.

So even if you don’t have a cell phone, if a friend called your landline, then traveled to your house, then to another location, and then back to your house, someone with access to that information could make an educated guess that you went with that friend to that particular location.