IT’S apparently pretty easy to find out who’s been stalking you on Facebook.
According to one TikTok star, the profiles snooping on you most are those that appear in the social media app’s “suggested friends” section.
User @annielydia highlighted the supposed trick earlier this year in a short post to the video-sharing app.
“I just found out your suggested friends on Facebook is people who’ve been stalking your page,” she told her 73,000 TikTok followers.
“Girls don’t stalk his Mum or exes.”
Facebook’s suggested friends tool flags the profiles of people you might know. It uses a multitude of factors to determine potential contacts.
The feature has been known to suggest users who have no or few mutual friends on the network.
The viral TikTok clip has garnered more than 500,000 views since it was posted in March.
In comments under the clip, users weighed in on what they thought drove the app’s contact suggestions.
One replied: “Yeah this is true I found this out ages ago! Whoever searches your page will come up on there.”
Another wrote: “This came out years ago and is definitely not true, it’s mostly friends of friends etc.”
Officially, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, says that profiles are flagged as suggested friends based on a variety of factors.
Those include “mutual friends, work and education information, networks you’re part of, contacts you’ve imported and many other factors.”
There are a variety of conspiracy theories over what these “other factors” are.
Some have suggested that the places you’ve been, profiles you’ve looked at and your phone contacts may have an impact on who is suggested.
When you sign up to Facebook, the app and website ask for your permission to collect this data to help improve its services.
However, the precise ways that they are used remains unclear.
It’s entirely possible, for instance, that Facebook takes into account the profiles that you’ve looked at when suggesting friends.
However, a variety of other factors also contribute. If you’re mutual friends with three people, for instance, it’s likely you’ll show up as a friend suggestion.
The Sun has reached out to Facebook for comment.
In other news, Facebook has announced that it’s changing its name to “Meta”.
The company is working to create lifelike avatars of its users that they can control in a virtual world called the “metaverse”.
Apple’s system that exposes creepy iPhone apps that track your location or snoop on your browsing history has finally arrived.
And, astronomers claim to have spotted the first known planet outside of the Milky Way.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at [email protected]
This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk