All that clicking that link told Facebook is that you're a real person who reads their emails. It's like when you pick up the phone for a telemarketer, now they know they can continue bothering you because you're a real person and you answer your phone.

The few times a telemarketer reaches through to me on one of my phones, I've put them off by asking in a niche foreign language in that nation whether they speak that language. Most of the time, they immediately hang up and I never hear from them again. Sometimes, they repeat their script, then hang up. I've never had someone respond in that language (that would be a blast to address).

Tech companies prey on people's sense of good faith.

Expect to be asked to provide more "factors" in the future.

Guess who gets "smart matches" spam in Chinese.

I would lay money that Facebook just uses that unsubscribe as another data point.

I'm curious how it got your email -- and decided to use it. I have several publicly visible emails, and they've received plenty of spam, but none from FB like that.

I also know that one of my so-called "friends" posted a group picture with me in it, and labeled the people in the picture. At one point I did a search to see what information was out there about myself, and that picture popped up associated with my name.

I guess that I'm just another casualty of the information age, in spite of my best efforts.

But with ML facial recognition I figure the jig is up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI

In general, AI that's hawked at CEO types and police is mostly snake oil, inferior to what you can make yourself if you read hackernews and are willing to dive into Arxiv.

Not sure how much of that has changed since then. But contact data is by far the most valuable mined from phones. Facebook is no exception.

I know it suggested my ex-girlfriend as a connection when I opened my account, five years after we'd last talked.

There's a lot of data flowing around out there, and people overwhelmingly willingly hand it over. You'd think that there would be a law that, having collected that data, they would be required to hold it in confidence - Not for you, but as an agent of the friend who gave them that data. And there likely is, but good luck getting it enforced.

This is basically how LinkedIn grew their network - read your addressbook, put a "invite everyone you know" button in the on-boarding slideshow. Facebook just does the extra work of noticing your email in other people's address books, so they can tell you who your friends will be before you even sign up.

I almost read that as FBI dossier. Similar idea, though presumably for advertising purposes.

Please avoid such comments, they just add noise and distract everyone from the original discussion.

To my knowledge, there is no monetary compensation involved (bounty) though.

[1] https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/06/fina...

Pardon my skepticism if your only source of truth is "Facebook told regulators".

Facebook doesn't delete shit. If you work at Facebook, you need to evaluate the ethical course of your life and career and reconsider the choices that led you to this place. There are other employers that pay almost as well and that don't treat 1984 like a mission statement.

And surely they'd never mislead anybody regarding what data they keep.

Which admittedly makes it a bit hard to explain how, despite having completely deleted my account several years ago (yes, not just deactivated, I went through all the little guilt-trip pleas not to delete), they managed to accidentally (a bug, presumably) send me a Friend Suggestion email several weeks ago (suggesting someone I actually do know, no less) considering that by their own words they should have wiped both that email address and the social graph associated with it several years earlier...

Oh, you mean the account that you confirmed as deleted 8+ years ago??

There's still a list of names and a bunch of data. No question.