So I’m one of the 2 billion users- so what.

But my paranoia about being on the site is getting the better of me lately. I’ve always known not to post anything that I wouldn’t want the whole world to see but these guys have taken severe liberties with your information.

When I first joined, they had pics of people that “i might know” and suggested they should be friends. It was quickly apparent that these people were friends of friends and some random people thrown in for good measure. Then I noticed some people from my email contacts. This bothered me. How could they get my email contacts? They have my address but I never gave them access to my account. If there was an option to do this, I would have never chosen it so I concluded that these email contacts of mine must have given FB their contacts and since I’m one of their contacts- that’s how the friend suggestion was made.

That was 5 years ago. Today I find they do have my email contacts. You need to know I don’t have an iPhone or any smart phone for that matter. Just a company flip phone. I’m only on the site while at a desktop.

I’m pretty sure FB pulls the contacts out of your smart phone unless you know what settings to change. In their phone app, there is a “continuous contact update” feature. You can delete your contacts but if you don’t turn this off, it will refresh the list by itself.
And since I don’t have a phone, that’s not where they got my contact list anyway.

I just deleted my contacts on the desktop app. To do it, you have to go to

facebook.com/invite_history.php

We’ll see if they stay deleted or if it’s auto updated as well.

And this is why I started looking into it:

Yesterday, on my ancient flip phone, I called “Bills Truck Parts” in California to order a part for one of our trucks and hung up after being put on hold. Not 10 minutes later I see an ad for “Bills Truck Parts” on my FB page.

This parts house is very obscure and so is the truck I was buying parts for. I’ve never “liked” Bills truck parts on FB so it didn’t come from them directly. And it couldn’t have been picked randomly from my “likes”. This wasn’t a coincidence. It may have come from a google search but that would have been over 4 years ago.

How the hell did they do it?