Facebook: “People You May Know” vs. Protecting Private Friends List?
Facebook has this handy “People You May Know” function that allows people to conveniently find their distant friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. The way this works is that if User X is friends with User Y, then Facebook gives User X friend suggestions based on User Y’s public interaction with his or her friends. However, this then proposes a problem: what if User Y’s friend list is set to private? This is the question that Irene Abezgauz, the vice president of product management at Quotium, explored through her experiment. The “People You May Know” function overrides the privacy setting for one’s friends-list.
Abezgauz created two accounts, User A and User B on Facebook. User A’s friend list was set to private, and User A’s friends had their friend list as private as well. Moreover, User A had no public interaction with the friends on Facebook. Then, User B adds User A, which User A does not respond to. Now, User B gets a list of suggested friends on the “People You May Know” list, based on the fact that User B has added User A.
This seems like the downside of trying to abide by the Triadic Closure Principle. Facebook is trying to connect the three nodes, (i.e. User A, User B, and User A’s friend) together to create that triangular formation of networks. Usually, this would have been a great function, since it helps “people who may know” each other connect and interact. Unfortunately, this goes against User A’s desired privacy settings. Perhaps this shows that Facebook is more concerned with connecting people together than people’s desired privacy settings.
Link: http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/21/facebook-friends-list/