Facebook friend finder is really creepy. It has suggested to me:
- The father of a friend of mine—whose existence in Facebook was unknown to the said friend of mine himself.
- The twin brother of a colleague of mine—of whose family I had no idea whatsoever about,
- Close friends of a school-going young relative of mine—though I had no Gmail or any other web-based contact with the said relative for a long time.
- An old and longstanding crush of a friend
- Ex-girlfriend of a friend.
Additionally, I have lost count of the number of times when I first saw somebody's profile on Facebook through their twisted suggestion mechanism, and much, much later, came to know who the person actually is.
And many more.
I have no idea how on earth they find out all this connecting information. I have locked my security settings to the maximum. Nobody can find me on Facebook unless I go to them and add them as a friend. Then how is this possible? How does it work?
Best Answer
Facebook has access to all friendship-data on their site, even if you lock down the privacy settings. As an addition many users share their contact-book or even e-mails with Facebook. Most peoples have filled out their profile quite decent so it has data about your school, your employer, your current place, your interests and so on. Although Facebook states it does not use it, they can track all users (and even non-users) across many websites via the "like"-button which is transcluded directly from Facebook.
From this data it can calculate this friend requests.