New Report Shows How Facebook Tracks Your Phone’s Location to Suggest Friends

[Maura]

According to a new report from Fusion, via BGR, Facebook is tracking its users’ locations via their phones in order to suggest friends based on their location. Luckily, you can stop this very easily by refusing the Facebook app permission to do so in settings. However, as Fusion notes, the intrusive way in which Facebook is doing this could lead to a serious breach of your privacy.

In a statement to Fusion, a Facebook spokesperson said that suggesting people that you might know based on location is only one of the factors used for such prompts:

“People You May Know are people on Facebook that you might know. We show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you’re part of, contacts you’ve imported and many other factors.

“Location information by itself doesn’t indicate that two people might be friends. That’s why location is only one of the factors we use to suggest people you may know.”

However, Fusion points out how this can still lead to a potentially serious breach of privacy, with the example of an occasion when someone who went to an anonymous parents’ meeting for suicidal teens was then presented with one of the parents who had attended the anonymous meeting in their friends suggestion box the next day on Facebook. The two people had not previously shared their contact information, and it transpires that the only thing that could possibly have linked them to each other was their location the previous night.

The person in question then found that their Facebook app had permission to always access their location, which they then immediately changed to “never.”

As BGR notes, although the problem was easily solved, the damage could have been done if it had not been noticed, and Facebook doesn’t help matters by not making it explicitly clear that location details can be used to recommend new friends to a user. So just to be on the safe side, it might be best to check right now if Facebook is able to access your location.

Sources: Facebook is tracking your phone’s location to recommend friends

Facebook Is Using Your Phone's Location to Suggest New Friends—which Could Be a Privacy Disaster

 

[scifan57]

I think that Facebook isn't concerned in the least with its users privacy but only with what can profit it. Facebook today is unrecognisable compared to what it was originally intended to be.

 

[spencerdl]

I actually noticed that Facebook was not in my privacy settings so I went into the app settings....

My family and friends do not need to know my business..LOL [emoji12]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[scifan57]

I wouldn't be surprised it Facebook finds a way to override the privacy settings on the iPhone. They have too great a desire to know everything about everybody to be satisfied with privacy restrictions.

 

[Pinkpoison]

I'm very glad I gave Facebook the elbow.