Wednesday, January 20 2010
How it happened
It’s actually a very simple story. I’m on Facebook and I see the following image:
Now I start to think to myself, who is this person? A quick Google search reveals very simply that Gianna is a porn star. Gianna is also most likely not her real name (duh!). Now the rest of this discussion has nothing to do with porn (sorry to disappoint), but merely a thought experiment as to how whatever silly algorithm they have running at Facebook could have calculated that this was a relevant suggestion.
WTF Facebook?
So now down to some deductive reasoning. There are a couple of ideas that I have as to how this list of friends gets compiled:
1. Friends of Friends (Decision: Plausible)
Now friend suggestions that I’ve seen in the past were usually people with whom I shared a non-trivial amount of mutual friends. I don’t pretend to know who all my friends are friends with, so I think it’s entirely possible that this suggestion was the result of mutual friends. Gianna’s profile is restricted, so I’m going to file this as “plausible.”
2. Popularity : (Decision: Undecided)
On other services like Twitter, it is very common for suggestions to be based on the number of friends, followers, connections, whatever a certain individual has. I was not aware of this kind of feature being part of Facebook, but it could have silently been rolled out without my knowledge. Concurrently, it is equally plausible that a porn star could surpass whatever friend threshold is necessary to become a common suggestion. I’m going to file this under “undecided” until I can get some kind of confirmation that a feature like this exists. Any comments Facebook.com?
3. External Data : (Decision: Scary, Unlikely)
Last, but certainly not least is the possibility that Facebook may have made this suggestion by pulling information from third party sources. I find this unlikely since there is no data (public or private) that would connect my real name to Gianna. Taking into consideration the legal heat that Facebook took for it’s Beacon product which used similar third party information I’m going to this under “scary, but unlikely.”
Thoughts
This thought experiment was executed with absolutely no rigor or scientific process. It’s just my nonsensical ramblings using a fuzzy (at best) first-order logic framework. So what do you think?
Comments
Brian said on Wednesday, January 20, 2010:
I've had facebook suggest a friend to me that they could have only had done by sniffing my hotmail inbox. Scary, but I couldn't find any other link. The only connection I had to this person was through email. And I never gave them my password…
JimBastard said on Wednesday, February 03, 2010:
I think it's more then likely your credit card activity or browser history got hooked into FB. I bet you have viewed / paid for a website owned by the same production company who works with Gianna.