Block People You May Know on Facebook Script
In May 2008, Facebook announced what initially seemed like a fun, whimsical addition to its platform: People You May Know.
"We built this feature with the intention of helping yous connect to more of your friends, especially ones you lot might not have known were on Facebook", said the post.
It went on to become one of Facebook's most important tools for building out its social network, which expanded from 100 million members then to over two billion today. While some people must certainly have been grateful to get help connecting with everyone they've ever known, other Facebook users hated the feature. They asked how to plough it off.
They downloaded a "FB Purity" browser extension to hide it from their view. Some users complained about it to the US federal agency tasked with protecting American consumers, saying it constantly showed them people they didn't want to friend. Another user told the Federal Trade Commission that Facebook wouldn't cease suggesting she friend strangers "posed in sexually explicit poses".
In an investigation last yr, we detailed the ways People You May Know, or PYMK, as it's referred to internally, tin can show detrimental to Facebook users. Information technology mines data users don't have control over to make connections they may not want it to make. The worst case of this we documented is when sexual practice workers are outed to their clients.
When lawmakers recently sent Facebook over 2,000 questions about the social network's operation, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) raised concerns most PYMK suggesting a psychiatrist's patients friend one another and asked whether users tin opt out of Facebook collecting or using their data for People You May Know, which is another mode of asking whether users can turn information technology off.
Facebook responded by suggesting the senator see their answer to a previous question, only the real answer is "no".
Facebook refuses to allow users opt out of PYMK, telling us last year, "An opt out is not something nosotros think people would notice useful". Perhaps now, though, in its time of privacy reckoning, Facebook will reconsider the mandatory nature of this item feature. It's near time, because People You May Know has been getting on people's fretfulness for over 10 years.
Facebook didn't come up with the idea for PYMK out of thin air. LinkedIn had launched People You May Know in 2006, originally displaying its suggested connections as ads that got the highest click-through rate the professional person networking site had always seen. Facebook didn't bother to come upwardly with a different name for it.
"People You May Know looks at, amidst other things, your electric current friend list and their friends, your education info and your work info", Facebook explained when it launched the feature.
That wasn't all. Within a year, AdWeek was reporting that people were "spooked" by the advent of "people they emailed years ago" showing up as "People They May Know". When these users had commencement signed upward for Facebook, they were prompted to connect with people already on the site through a "Discover People You Email" function; it turned out Facebook had kept all the email addresses from their inboxes.
That was agonizing because Facebook hadn't disclosed that it would store and reuse those contacts. (According to the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook merely started providing that disclosure after the Commission investigated it in 2012.)
Though Facebook is now upfront about using uploaded contacts for PYMK, its and so-primary privacy officeholder, Chris Kelly, refused to confirm it was happening.
"We are constantly iterating on the algorithm that we apply to decide the Suggestions section of the home page", Kelly told Adweek in 2009. "We do not share details almost the algorithm itself".
Address books were so valuable to Facebook in its early days that one of the commencement companies it acquired, at the beginning of 2010, was Malaysia-based Octazen, a contact importing service that had been used, until its acquisition by Facebook, to tap into user contacts on the world's biggest social and e-mail sites.
In a TechCrunch postal service at the time, Michael Arrington suggested that acquiring a tiny start-up on the other side of the globe only fabricated sense if Octazen had been secretly keeping users' contact information from all the sites information technology worked with to build a "shadow social network".
That would have been incredibly valuable to a and then-fledging Facebook, but Facebook dismissed the unsupported claim, saying that it just needed a couple of guys who could quickly assist it build tools to suck up contacts from novel services as it expanded into new countries.
That was of import because to exist the best social network it could exist, Facebook needed to develop a list of everyone in the earth and how they were continued. Fifty-fifty if you don't give Facebook access to your own contact volume, it tin can acquire a lot about you past looking through other people's contact books.
If Facebook sees an email address or a phone number for you in someone else'south address book, information technology will adhere it to your business relationship as "shadow" contact information that y'all can't encounter or access.
That means Facebook knows your work email accost, even if y'all never provided it to Facebook and tin can recommend y'all friend people y'all've corresponded with from that address. It means when you sign up for Facebook for the very offset time, it knows right away "who all your friends are.".
And it means that exchanging phone numbers with someone, say at an Alcoholics Bearding meeting, will result in your not being bearding for long.
Smartphone behemoth Apple seems to take just recently realised how valuable address books are and how hands they can be driveling past nefarious actors. In a Bloomberg report, an iOS developer called address books "the Wild West of data".
In June, Apple tree changed its rules for app developers to forbid accessing iPhone contacts "to build a contact database for your own employ." Apple didn't respond to a request for comment near whether Facebook's collection of contact information for its People You May Know database violates that dominion.
In 2010, Ellenora Fulk of Pierce County, Washington, saw a woman she didn't recognise popular upwards in her People Yous May Know. In the accompanying profile photo, the woman was with Fulk'southward estranged married man, standing next to a hymeneals cake and drinking champagne. After Fulk alerted the authorities, her married man, a corrections officeholder who had changed his terminal proper noun, was charged with bigamy.
He was sentenced to 1 year in gaol, but was able to append the sentence by paying a $US500 ($673) "victim compensation" fee, presumably to wife #1. Both marriages were concluded, the first in divorce and the 2d in disparateness. PYMK takes casualties.
Early on on, Facebook realised there were some connections between people that information technology shouldn't make. A person familiar with the People You May Know squad's early piece of work said that every bit it was perfecting the fine art of linking people, there was one golden dominion: "Don't suggest the mistress to the married woman".
One of the principal ways PYMK systems figure out who knows each other is through "triangle-closing", as LinkedIn put it in a blog post: "If Alice knows Bob and Bob knows Carol, so possibly Alice knows Carol". But that tin can become awkward if you are making those connections by looking at a person's private contact list rather than at their public friend listing.
Bob might accept phone numbers for both Alice and Carol in his telephone because Alice is his wife and Carol is his side piece. Bob doesn't want that particular triangle to close, then Facebook's engineers initially avoided making suggestions that relied solely on "two hops" through a contact book.
Despite hiccups like the Fulk incident, People You May Know was batting it out of the park. During a presentation in July 2010, the engineer in charge of PYMK said information technology was responsible for "a significant chunk of all friending on Facebook". That was important because "people with more friends use the site more than", according to the 2010 presentation by Lars Backstrom, who went on to go the head of engineering for all of Facebook.
Backstrom got his PhD from Cornell where he studied how social networks evolve. When he joined Facebook in 2009, he got the chance to command the evolution. Backstrom built "the PYMK backend infrastructure and automobile learning system". Backstrom explained in his 2010 talk how the PYMK algorithm decided which "friends of friends" to put in your "People Yous May Know" box: Facebook looked at not just how many mutual friends you had, but how recently those friendships were made and how invested you lot were in them.
That all got converted into maths. In engineering language, a person is a "node" and a friendship between people is an "edge". If you lot appear to exist in a clustered node with someone else — i.eastward., have a lot of mutual friends — and all the edges are fresh — i.e., a lot of those friendships are recent — that is like an algorithmic alert bell going off, maxim that a new clique has been formed offline and should be replicated digitally on the social network.
Illustration: Lars Backstrom, Graphanalysis.org
But just having friends in mutual doesn't mean that you necessarily desire to exist friends with someone. In 2015, Kevin Kantor recounted in spoken poetry how painful information technology was to have his rapist show upwardly equally a "person you lot should know". He and his rapist had three mutual friends.
The same year, a woman whom I volition call Flora, to protect her anonymity, went on a first appointment with a guy she met via a dating app. Flora doesn't similar new, strange men to know too much about her, and so she only tells them her nickname. She was happy about that in this case, because things immediately turned sour with the guy and he began to harass her via text, sending her messages repeatedly for months which she ignored.
In the spring of 2016, virtually a yr after she first met him, he sent her a bulletin revealing he now knew her real name because she had been suggested to him as a "person he may know" on Facebook.
When y'all get-go aggressively mining people's social networks, it'south like shooting fish in a barrel to surface people we know that we don't desire to know.
In the summertime of 2015, a psychiatrist was meeting with ane of her patients, a 30-something snowboarder. He told her that he'd started getting some odd People You May Know suggestions on Facebook, people who were much older than him, many of them looking ill or infirm. He held up his phone and showed her his friend recommendations which included an older man using a walker. "Are these your patients?" he asked.
The psychiatrist was aghast because she recognised some of the people. She wasn't friends with her patients on Facebook and in fact barely used it, just Facebook had figured out that she was a link betwixt this grouping of individuals, probably considering they all had her contact information; based obviously on that alone, Facebook seemed to have decided they might want to be friends.
"It'southward a massive privacy fail",the psychiatrist told me at the time.
In 2016, a man was arrested for car robbery after he was suggested to his victim as a Facebook friend. How that connection was made, if it wasn't just a coincidence, is inexplicable.
In his 2010 presentation, Lars Backstrom said it would be well-nigh incommunicable for Facebook to suggest more than than "Friends of Friends" every bit People Yous May Know. Yet he showed a graph that demonstrated that a good number of friendships on Facebook were between people who had no obvious necktie. At that place was no path betwixt them, fifty-fifty if you did a network analysis that allowed for 12 degrees of Kevin Salary.
To be able to predict connections between people where the "paths" weren't obvious, Facebook would need more data. And since so, it has adult new avenues to learn more nearly its users. It bought Instagram in 2012 and tin now utilize information almost whose photos you lot intendance well-nigh to recommend friends. In 2014, information technology bought WhatsApp, which would theoretically give it directly insight into who letters who.
Facebook says information technology doesn't currently use information from WhatsApp for People Yous May Know, though a close read of its privacy policy shows that information technology's given itself the right to do then: "Facebook … may apply information from us to improve your experiences inside their services such equally making product suggestions (for example, of friends or connections, or of interesting content)".
Facebook continues to seek out novel means to better go to know its users, reportedly seeking data from hospitals and from banks. And as more than and more people downloaded Facebook'southward apps to their smartphones, Facebook engineers realised that offered a well of valuable data for PYMK.
In 2014, Facebook filed a patent awarding for making friend recommendations based on detecting that two smartphones were in the same place at the same time; it said you could compare the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, to tell whether the people were facing each other or walking together.
Facebook said it hasn't put that technique into practice and despite persistent claims to the contrary, says that it doesn't use location derived from people'due south phones or IP addresses to make friend suggestions.
In 2015, an engineer suggested in a patent application that Facebook could look at photo metadata, such as presence of grit on the camera lens, to determine if 2 people had uploaded photos taken by the same camera. That anyone would e'er want to exist subjected to this level of scrutiny and algorithmic pseudo-science for the sake of a friend recommendation was not addressed by the engineer.
In 2016, North Carolina creative person Andy Herod opened a show called Lamentable I Made It Weird: Portraits of People Yous May Know. Herod had painted portraits of 30 strangers who Facebook had suggested he might know. He didn't actually know any of them.
Creative person Andy Herod with one of the portraits inspired by a People You lot May Know suggestion he received on Facebook (Photograph: Andy Herod)
"Facebook is such a big part of people'south lives", said Herod past telephone. "They don't think near the fact that their photos are constantly beingness popped up into strangers' homes, through PYMK".
Herod wanted to put those photos permanently on someone's walls. An Asheville art collector, who prefers to stay anonymous, bought the bulk of Herod's serial. As it happens, the collector is not a member of the social network; he quit Facebook in 2009 because it was "one big advert space" and a "graveyard of ex girlfriends" — which is how a lot of people might describe their People You lot May Know.
Quitting Facebook is the obvious answer for users disturbed past the social network's practices. But for people dependent on Facebook for professional or personal reasons, it'due south not an choice, and so they remain and have to accept that the social network volition mine information about them that they tin can't run across or control to make unwelcome suggestions to them.
That mining is particularly disturbing because it seems Facebook may have abandoned its own golden rule against making friend suggestions based on "ii hops" though contact books. Final year, in 2017, Facebook recommended I friend a relative I didn't know I had.
I could non figure out how Facebook had linked me to Rebecca Porter, a biological cracking-aunt from an estranged part of my family unit, because none of the people who linked us were on Facebook. Since then I've adamant it must be because Facebook drew a long and complicated path betwixt me and a distant relative by analysing information in the contact books of two otherwise disconnected users: Rebecca Porter and my stepmother both had the e-mail address and phone number for some other Porter and I am friends with my stepmother on Facebook.
If that is indeed how Facebook fabricated the link, that is some NSA-level network science.
Making connections like that is how you current of air up "recommending the mistress to the wife". An acquaintance of mine recently told me that happened to him, but the gender roles were reversed. He figured out his wife had resumed an affair she had ended years earlier when the guy suddenly started showing upwards in his People You lot May Know. Facebook was essentially telling him, "Hey, this guy is part of your network again".
He confronted his wife and she admitted to it. "Cheers, Facebook, for being the fucking Stasi", he texted me.
Facebook won't make its current People Y'all May Know team bachelor for interviews. But in a leaked memo published by Buzzfeed in March, Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth explained the thinking that motivates tools like PYMK.
"The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so securely that anything that allows united states of america to connect more than people more often is *de facto* good", he wrote in 2016. "That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle linguistic communication that helps people stay searchable past friends".
In other words, People Y'all May Know is an invaluable product considering it helps connect Facebook users, whether they desire to be connected or not. It seems clear that for some users, People You lot May Know is a problem.
It'south not a characteristic they want and not a feature they want to exist part of. When the characteristic debuted in 2008, Facebook said that if you didn't similar information technology, you could "10" out the people who appeared in that location repeatedly and eventually information technology would disappear. (If you don't meet the characteristic on your ain Facebook page, that may be the reason why.) But that wouldn't end you from continuing to be recommended to other users.
Facebook needs to requite people a hard out for the feature, because scourging phone address books and email inboxes to connect you lot with other Facebook users, while welcome to some people, is offensive and harmful to others. Through its aggressive data-mining this huge corporation is gaining unwanted insight into our medical privacy, past heartaches, family dramas, sensitive work associations and random one-time encounters.
And then Facebook, consider belatedly celebrating People You May Know's 10th ceremony by letting users opt out of it entirely.
Source: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/08/people-you-may-know-a-controversial-facebook-features-10-year-history/
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