Have you been getting strange "friend recommendations" from Facebook recently? Have you wondered how the social networking site has managed to connect you with a work contact or the husband of a colleague?
An investigation by the journalism.co.uk website claims to have the answers: address book importing (ABI) is the technique used to transfer your email contacts between email accounts or clients. But ABI is also being used by Facebook and other sites to get hold of and make use of users' address book information.
Using its "friend finder" tool, Facebook encourages users to upload their contact information from either their email account or from a desktop address book. The site then uses this information to link you to people you email. This could include people you have emailed just a couple of times. (Other sites like Twitter and Friendster also use ABI.)
Users' contact details are also used by Facebook to create public links between other people. There are concerns that Facebook users unwittingly give away sensitive information by being publicly linked to the people they have emailed.
Facebook said: "The information on the help page and in the blog post clearly sets out what the friend finder does and how users control how and if their contacts are shared."
Facebook has been attempting to move away from being a private site where users' content is kept behind a wall to having more content shared and publicly searchable, like its fast-growing competitor Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment