Michigan Radio & TV Buzzboard

Turkeytop wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 18, 2019 1:13 pm

Both of our sons work in tech. One of them explained it to me. It's legitimate but very sneaky. Someone in my acquaintance has my name and e mail address in their contacts list on their smart phone. They use that phone to access their face page. Facebook then goes in and scoops up their contacts list. When it finds someone on that list who doesn't have an account, it creates one for them.

The one thing I don't think I'll ever do is Facebook on my cell.
Facebook's business model is selling information about people.
Giving them my phone number is, in my opinion, just asking to get spam phone calls.

Turkeytop wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 18, 2019 1:13 pm

Both of our sons work in tech. One of them explained it to me. It's legitimate but very sneaky. Someone in my acquaintance has my name and e mail address in their contacts list on their smart phone. They use that phone to access their face page. Facebook then goes in and scoops up their contacts list. When it finds someone on that list who doesn't have an account, it creates one for them.

That's a problem! If accurate, it would mean that Facebook is potentially mining data on people who don't have accounts. Once they have your identity it would be easy for their bots to scrape the internet in search of any info or activity connected to it. Whether you choose to light up an account or not, they know what they know, and they can sell what they know to any interested third parties. Granted they're not supposed to do that without your consent, but then again we're talking about Facebook. It's appalling, but not surprising.

So, after about four months I still haven't activated the account. But every day they e mail lists of names of people I should befriend. Weirdly, many of the names are people I know. But there are a lot I don't know and have never heard of.

An interesting one tonight -Erica Quickie.