Not on Facebook? News flash: Facebook still knows about you

A great read from Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo about how Facebook doesn’t keep profiles for non-users, but it does use their contact information to connect people:

What if you don’t like Facebook having this data about you? All you need to do is find every person who’s ever gotten your contact information and uploaded it to Facebook, and then ask them one by one to go to Facebook’s contact management page and delete it.

Bad news folks. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never even created an account on Facebook, it still knows about you. And there’s next to nothing you can do about it.

At the very least, if you must have a Facebook account don’t ever grant it access to your address book and contacts, and use a unique email address (rather than your regular one) when you create an account.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.