The way Facebook finds your suggested friends is much creepier than we ever thought

It’s happened to us all. We’re scrolling through Facebook and suddenly the young one you shifted behind Leisureplex in 2005 is popping up as a suggested friend.

You haven’t been in contact in near a decade so how on earth does the tech giant know about your sordid history. Well, according to new reports, Facebook is being a total creep and using your location services to track down people you may have come into contact with. The reports state that the company appears to have been testing out a tool that tracked where its users were and matched them up with other people who were in the same area. It’s not the first time technology has used location services to find pals. Happn and Tinder work based on location services but for unsuspecting Facebook users, the results are a tad creepy. The reports were first revealed by Fusion who spoke to Facebook about the feature. “People You May Know are people on Facebook that you might know,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “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.” The spokesperson confirmed that location services are a factor but are combined with other information. “Location information by itself doesn’t indicate that two people might be friends,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “That’s why location is only one of the factors we use to suggest people you may know.” And while it seems innocent enough, the reality is that location services pose certain risks to users. “Using location data this way is dangerous,” law professor Woodrow Hartzog told Fusion. “People need to keep their visits to places like doctor’s offices, rehab, and support centers discreet. Once Facebook users realize that the ‘People You May Know’ are the ‘People That Go To the Same Places You Do,’ this feature will inevitably start outing people’s intimate information without their knowledge.”

“This is the kind of thing that people should be given explicit and multiple warnings about,” - Woodrow Hartzog.

“They should also be asked to affirmatively turn on the feature before their whereabouts are used to get them friends. Geolocation data is far more sensitive than most of the kinds of information people probably assume are used to suggest friends, such as alma mater and mutual friends.”