Sometimes Facebook can surprise you. I remember wondering why I had a common friend with somebody. I popped over to their home page to see if there was any information that would help me. What I found made me click the unfollow button pretty sharpish. I had no idea how dodgy they were.
One of the features Facebook offers is People You May Know (PYMK). Normally it is people with mutual friends, or other obvious connections (place or work etc). If you look at the list you will see how many mutual friends you have with the suggestion.
Occasionally I get suggestions that are clearly dodgy accounts, supposedly attractive young women. They have no friends in common. There are a few ways that could happen, but when you track it down it can be a friend that has them in their friends list, but they try to hide their list so people don’t know.
On the occasions that I have managed to track the friend responsible it has been an older married man. Okay, they have an interest in younger women (not criminal). But then they are trying to hide it (they have that right).
But what else are they interested in? Is it my business? Actually, a lot of the profiles are fake – designed to mine personal data. So yes it is my business. If a friend is not taking precautions it will leak some of my data to people I don’t want to have it.
As we start to come out of the lockdown this will be an issue we have for a few months. Until we get to the point where people are vaccinated we need to think about how our actions could affect others.
So I think we will see a slow release announced next week – lets face it – too many of us need to be told to consider others.