Facebooks „People You May Know“-Funktion

Facebook weiß einiges über Personen, die selbst nicht auf Facebook sind; noch mehr natürlich über diejenigen, die dabei sind. Der Kern des Unheils liegt in der „People You May Know“ (PYMK)-Funktion, die über den Abgleich hunderter, freiwillig hochgeladener (!) Adressbücher, Telefonnummern und E-Mailadressen Verbindungen herstellt, die einem bisweilen selbst nicht bewusst sind. Zum Beispiel:

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.”

Blöderweise gilt für die Daten, sind sie einmal hochgeladen, eine strikte Policy, die es nur denen, die die Daten hochladen, ermöglicht, sie auch wieder zu entfernen.

What if you don’t like Facebook having this data about you? All you need to do is find every person who’s ever gotten your contact information and uploaded it to Facebook, and then ask them one by one to go to Facebook’s contact management page and delete it. Just don’t miss anyone. “Once a contact is deleted, we remove it from our system—but of course it is possible that the same contact has been uploaded by someone else,” Steinfeld wrote in an email.

…und das alles für ein paar Links und ein paar Likes.