IT TURNS out it’s not so easy to find out who’s been stalking you on Facebook.
A TikTok star has falsely claimed that the profiles snooping on you most are those that appear in the social media app’s “suggested friends” section.
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Facebook has categorically denied that this is the case.
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 other factors.
There are a variety of conspiracy theories over what these other factors are.
Some have suggested that the places you’ve been and profiles you’ve looked at 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.
Facebook has denied that it uses the profiles people have looked at to suggest friends.
“People you may know suggestions can be friends of friends, people in your same network or people you may have something else in common with,” it says on its website.
“People on Facebook won’t know you’ve searched for them or visited their profile.”
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How to enable Touch ID or Face ID on WhatsApp for extra privacy protection
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.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
