Shadow profiles on Facebook

Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Facebook servers?

Now I don’t know if “shadow profile” is the best term for what these things are, but that is what they are being called so let’s stick with that. You’ve, no doubt, heard about them since Facebook spoke of the data leak for 6 million users. The tech journalism industry has been all over these thing, but what the hell are they? They are profiles for each user that hold data you never shared with Facebook.

So how did Facebook get the information, you may ask? I’d tell you that your friends handed it over. You might tell me, “But Jay, I’ve never even met Edward Snowden.” Ok, that was a cheap shot, but I couldn’t resist. Look, none of this is on purpose and none of it should be surprising. Here’s the skinny: You haven’t spoken to Jimmy since high school. Your email address has changed since high school, presumably because you grew up and dumped AOL to go to Yahoo! and got tired of penis enlargement advertisements and went to Gmail. Your phone number has not changed. Your name is John Smith. When Jimmy searches for you by name he gets an inordinate amount of results. So, Jimmy uses the find my friends feature of the mobile Facebook app. Your current phone number and old email address are bumped against the Facebook database and Jimmy finds you. Naturally, Facebook adds that old email address to your account (unbeknownst to you) so more people from high school can find you. This pisses you off for 2 reasons: Facebook has data you didn’t give them and you are talking to more people from high school. To make matters worse, Facebook uses all of this data to also recommend people. So that’s why (and how) Facebook knows you went on that one really bad blind date all that time ago.

Now that you understand how and why it happens, you want it to stop. Your next question to me is, “Jay, how do I make it stop?” As much as I’d like to help, the answer is that you can’t. You knew that already because you read the really long terms of service agreement when you signed up right? No? Oops. You authorized Facebook to collect information about you, not just to store information you give them, and not to determine which is recent and credible and use only that. They do not, however, collect information about people who do not use Facebook. That means my grandma’s phone number, that’s in my phone, is not on a Facebook server somewhere.

So does any of this matter? I don’t think so, but I’m fairly transparent; not Robert Scoble transparent, but fairly transparent. I understand that Facebook isn’t about making new connections. It is about rekindling old ones. It is about reconnecting you to people you already know in some way. I accept that mission and choose to use Facebook because of it (or in spite of it, depending on your stance). Facebook is doing what Facebook claims it does, and it’s mostly doing it well. It is also doing it without prompting me to add this data manually. It does it for me and I get to reconnect with people from long ago. My only choice is to accept or deny the friend request.

If you’re very private about old phone number, email addresses, or other personally identifiable information, you should be worried. Then again, if you’re that private about that kind of stuff, you probably shouldn’t be on Facebook in the first place.