Skip to main content

How does Facebook knows who your friends are?

By

Facebook knows who your friends are, even better than you do?

The social media giant uses a mix of complex science and mathematics to narrow down on your friends list.




Have you ever thought how Facebook exactly predicts your friends, sometimes even those whom you have long forgotten.

Last week, a Redditor named easyjet posted a thread on Reddit. He mentioned that he signed up with an email address he never, ever used. He even lied about all of his personal information. Yet Facebook was able to accurately predict and “recommend” a huge number of his real-life acquaintances including a women he had dated 19 years ago.

How does Facebook know who your friends are? Irish Data Protection Commissioner decided to conduct a full-scale investigation in 2011, into the same to help us out. Four years later due lot of confusion and misinformation we still are back to square one asking how does FB know who our friends are?

Did it scrape your phone for names and numbers? Run a reverse-image search of your picture? Compile a “shadow” or “ghost” profile on you over a period of years, just waiting for you to log on and “confirm” its guesses?

No Facebook doesnt attempt any sneaky or malicious ways to find our friend. It uses a pretty complex academic field called . . . network science.

In a nutshell, whenever you sign up for a Facebook account, it asks permission to look at your email contacts if you’re on a computer, or your phone contacts if you’re on a smartphone. When you grant the site permission, it searches your contacts for users already on the network, and it searches other users’ uploaded contacts for you.

That gives Facebook a basic idea of who you are, what your social circle is made of. This information is sometimes better than your memory.

Armed with basic idea of you, Facebook starts to refine your database by asking you more questions about yourself: where you went to school, when you were born, what city you live in.

Without your knowledge, each field you fill in your Facebook profile and each interaction you make through that profile actually doubles as a source of data for Facebook’s mapping algorithms.

Once Facebook knows the structure of your social network, it can analyze it to predict (with startling accuracy) not only the people you’re most likely to know now, but the people you’re most likely to know in the future. What FB does is not magic, its playing with permutations and combinations.

So next time you find that Facebook has recommended you a long forgotten friend, dont be surprised, its the power of statistics.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to fix a loose Micro-USB cable

By
Almost everyone has a smartphone or another device that connects with a Micro USB cable. And almost everyone has had a cable become loose over time and not fit securely. It can be disgusting to have the cable drop out a the slightest movement or to head endless pings from your computer telling you the cable disconnected. Rather than throw out a cable and get a new one, here’s a simple 5-min fix that can restore your cable back to new (or at least make it stay put). On most Micro USB cables there are a pair of metal tabs on one side. The problem is that over time these tabs can be flattened. When that happens the USB cable will be come loose unless the port is particularly tight. The way to fix this is to raise the tabs and then fold them over, making for a tighter and sturdier fit. The first thing we need to do is to raise the tabs. My friend used a precision flat screwdriver to lift the tabs as pictured below. You want to be careful doing this. While the tabs are meta
48 comments
Read more

Want to hack Gmail, Facebook accounts??

By
In the era of internet, emails and social networking have taken a prominent role in almost everyone's life especially when its come to the exchange of information and personal messages. So hacking a email/social networking account alone can reveal lot of personal informations about a person. Well this post is not about how to hack! But it is about making you aware of some of the password hacking spams and fake hacking tutorials. Many of the scam websites have managed to rank on top of Google for some of the most popular keywords about hacking. As a result, these websites attract a lot of people (who are in need of someone’s password) and promise them to give what they want! As most people do not have any knowledge about hacking, they often believe what is mentioned on these websites is true. Taking this factor as an added advantage, these websites (the so called hacking  services ) rip off money from the people and never keep up their promise. The big reason behin
411 comments
Read more

How to Hack and Access Unsecured Security Cameras Around the World

By
Technological advancement has made it possible for one to do basically anything that comes to mind using the internet. The internet has moved from the days where the web is solely used for text based information to the era where one can sit in his room and communicate with thousands of people around the web, share software, video, audio, photos and web cameras and security cameras as well. Though most security cameras shared on the web are meant for public display, very few of them are intended to be used privately by an organization or individual. One thing that most people don’t realize is google index all these security cameras streamed on the web and can easily be searched and viewed using Google. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can easily search and view unprotected security cameras using Google. Now open your browser and go to Google and type in any of the following inside the search box. inurl:"CgiStart?page=" inurl:/view.shtml intitl
203 comments
Read more