I once wrote about the meaning of friends in the social media age, citing Dunbar's number. Regardless of whom is being suggested or how anyone can even, how can all of these people possibly be considered "friends?" "A bunch of recruiters I've used in the past, along with long forgotten co-workers from years ago with no mutual friends have been showing up all week. "Facebook is doing something with the 'people you may know' feature that's bizarre and stalkerish," another area user told me. Now mailbox fire guy is in your suggested friends list. For instance: perhaps you worked at the same place as one of your friends, and one of their friends worked with them at a different place and that friend went to school with the guy who set fire to your mailbox. It seems Facebook is drawing parallels and guessing based on some deep commonalities below the surface. The 'People You May Know' section has become a dredge through the muddied rivers of our pasts, with no warning whatsoever. It's unsettling to imagine that this is happening with many users, some maybe faced with something worse than just 'scary.' That same area user then had a very profound thought, "what if Facebook is suggesting people that are actively searching for you - whether they be long lost relatives or straight up stalkers?" There's no contact information in my phone or shared friends with said entity." I pressed for any commonalities and there were none, not with email, not with the previous profile - nothing. One area user told me, "this morning Facebook suggested my scary ex out of nowhere. It's like Facebook hired private detectives to dig into our pasts and is suggesting friends based on that, rather than data point commonalities in our profiles. Some of us live in small towns, some in large cities but the connections Facebook is drawing to some people from us is bordering on stalking. Yet, something is going on with the way it is suggesting friends as it's a bit too coincidental. So Facebook isn't using location information. We may show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you are part of, contacts you've imported and other factors." In a statement to the company said, "We're not using location data, such as device location and location information you add to your profile, to suggest people you may know. Quickly after that report was published and social media users started to react negatively, Facebook backed off that statement.
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