Who's watching you?

For several months I’ve been growing increasingly puzzled at some of the people Facebook has been suggesting as friends. Sometimes it’s almost as if Facebook is psychic because it suggests people as friends who I know in real life but with whom there is no apparent connection online. Originally, Facebook would suggest friends of friends just on the off-chance that you might have some friends in common. This is fair enough, but recently I’ve noticed that Facebook is getting a little too on-the-money with the people it suggests. For example, it suggested the daughter of a colleague as a friend even though my colleague isn’t on Facebook. It has also suggested a couple of notable translation scholars which isn’t too earth shattering given that I’m a member of a translation-related group on Facebook and I feed my blog onto my profile page. Some of this can be easily explained by the fact that Facebook searches through your stated interests, groups, favourites etc. and suggests people who have the same interests as you. But today it made two suggestions, a recruitment consultant and an education website, with whom there is absolutely no connection on Facebook. The only connection is that the recruitment consultant’s name appears once on JodyByrne.com, and my name appears once on the education website. Now, the only way I can see that Facebook could make these suggestions is if it were searching the Internet for my name, comparing any names it finds on those pages against its list of members and then suggesting them as potential friends.

In a way I feel like some crackpot conspiracy theorist who thinks he’s figured out who killed JFK or what really happened at Roswell but I definitely feel uncomfortable about this and ever so slightly violated, and not in a good way. I know there’s absolutely no such thing as privacy on the Internet (especially if you’re an academic and especially if you use Facebook) but I don’t think I like the idea of Facebook basically checking up on me. Call it profiling, researching or spying but I’m fairly sure there’s a privacy issue here, or at the very least, an issue of informed consent and transparency on the part of Facebook as to how they come up with these suggestions and how exactly they use your information.