Creepy Facebook!
I joined Facebook after noticing that Andra had an account there, hoping that I could actually see her profile once I joined. That didn’t happen so it just became an account I never used until Alina suggested that it might be a way of keeping in touch, seeing as she tends to “vanish” for weeks or months at a time otherwise. So I started using it a little just to keep in touch with her, exchange messages and read what she writes on her page when I could. (I’m saying “when I could” because she usually writes in Finnish and it seems like pretty much all of her friends are Finnish, so most of the time I’m left staring at some strange words.) Then Sandra also stumbled upon me, so I added her too and had another reason to use it, though thankfully she’s easier to keep in touch with otherwise as well. That means I seem to find myself required to use that site, despite really hating it.
But hating something and being creeped out by it are two very different things, and Facebook creeped me out yesterday. I’m used to the suggestions column to feature random people from Alina’s and Sandra’s friends lists, none of which I know, but last night it was cycling between seven people, six of which I do know! One of them I talk to frequently, another I have exchanged a few occasional e-mails with over the past few months, but I lost contact with all the others quite some time ago, from several months for Ele to about seven years for Laurel, if I remember correctly.
At first I assumed that it read my Hotmail address book, since it can read the cookie and therefore doesn’t need your permission to do that, no matter what they say, but then I realized that I only have two of the six people listed there. Then I thought about my Yahoo! address book, since I was logged on to Yahoo! Messenger at the time and perhaps it could work with that too, but that only explains a third person, still leaving three others. I know I randomly searched for two of them and that might explain those… But that still leaves one, Ele, whose full name I didn’t even know until now. Jen said that, based on what she noticed recently, it seems like e-mail providers store who you have been in contact with and these sites can read that information, even if you don’t have those people in any contacts list and didn’t store any messages to or from them. But that doesn’t explain Ele either, seeing as she seems to be registered using a different e-mail address than the one I knew, because I searched by e-mail after recognizing her and I got no results.
I should add that now I see that it no longer says that Facebook will never store your contacts or password without your permission, but just that it won’t store your password, which I take as admitting that they are snooping through whatever accounts of yours they can access and retrieving your contacts. But since that doesn’t fully explain what happened, can anyone please tell me what the fuck’s going on?
