Facebook Users and Their Contacts: You’re Being Tracked

I don’t use Facebook personally.  I’d rather not be user generated content for a company that has every incentive to make my private information public.  But nearly everyone I know does have a Facebook account, and I can understand part of the appeal.  As I’ve mentioned in other posts on digital defense, I consider personal data protection to be part of self defense.  The details of your private life can be more valuable than what’s in your wallet or purse at any given time.

Even though I don’t use Facebook myself, I decided to put a FB like button (which you can see at the bottom of this post for example) on this site.  Since there are hundreds of millions of Facebook users, I figured it would be a good way for them to share this site with their friends.  In order to do that I signed up for a Facebook account to get a FB “application id”.  I have numerous email addresses, and I used the one associated with this website when I created the account.  To my horror, I was shown a list of people I may know.  How did Facebook know that I knew some of these people since I didn’t even have a Facebook account???

After doing a bit of research, it seems that Facebook asks users to upload their email contacts in order for Facebook to see if they have any “friends” on the network.  So even if you don’t use Facebook yourself, if you’ve emailed with someone who does, there’s a good chance that Facebook has connected you to that person through their email contact list.  Keeping your private life private just got a little bit harder…