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Who Is Stalking You On Facebook?
Who Is Your Biggest Fan?
Facebook has always been plagued with privacy issues, such as revealing to third parties personal information which may be used to sell you goods and services.& While to some, this may seem like an invasion, I like it when people try to sell me things, and I have no problem saying no.& However, there is a far more insidious algorithm embedded in facebook.& By a few refreshes and a few clicks, you can easily see who has most recently been looking at your facebook profile, down to a timeframe of 36 hours, as well as who your overall top stalkers are.& Of course, they may not be exactly stalking you, but they are watching you.& There are three methods to determine who looks at you the most, and these methods are all probabilistic rather than deterministic.& The first method is to refresh your profile page and see which friends appear again and again on your profile.& Typically, these are the people who look at your profile the most over a given time period.The second method is to invite every one of your friends to an event.& When you look at the three categories of people: 1) people who have accepted your invitation 2) people who are still waiting to reply, 3) people who have rejected your invitation, you can see the top 5 people who appear are the top 5 people in each category who look at your profile or pictures.The third method is to type in the first letter of each character in the alphabet on the search bar.& You will see that the first name which appears is either likely the last person you looked at, or if that is not the case, it was the last person who looked at you.& These three methods can be tested quite simply.& Just talk to that person who has been looking at you again and again and you will probably find an unexpected reaction, positive or negative, it will be strong.& You can also test this by sending someone an email and many times, before they even bother to reply to you, they will look at your profile and you will see their name pop up on the name bar as your last looker.Finally, you can just set up a few accounts, or ask your friends to look at your profile to see if I'm accurate.Even more scary, if you look at facebook's friend suggestions, more often than not those are people who you don't know who recently looked at your profile.& If you see someone who does not share any mutual friends with you, then you better watch out, because you might have a stalker on your hands.As of today, I believe you will find that I am correct.& However, who knows how long it will be before someone on facebook reads this article and asks the managers to change these settings.& However, given facebooks long history of furtively violating our privacy, how much can you really trust the Harvard Undergrads who cut each other's throats to get to the top (See facebook the movie)?& Remember what brought down friendster?& -- the window which showed you who last looked at your profile.& ONce people know that you know they are stalking you, then the entire system collapses.& But the difference between Friendster and Facebook is that Facebook is not so honest to tell you who the last people who looked at you were, but they do it none the less.
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Ed is an NGO representative to the United Nations for the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy.
He is a Columbia College graduate (Cum L Departmental...
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The first method is to refresh your profile page and see which friends appear again and again on your profile. Typically, these are the people who look at your profile the most over a given time period.I've also been testing this out a bit for a couple of days now and have decided that at least the refreshing profile to find who's been looking at your profile the most, has got to be wrong. Today for example one of my sons was at school and the other was still asleep in bed until 3pm after a late night, and yet they were both appearing at the top of the friends list on the LHS under my profile, after I repeatedly refreshed it. One thing's for sure, even if they were online, my facebook page is the last one that they would be looking at either today or over any period of time.
My 5 min film 'Hidden Dangers for ALS' entry in the AAN #2015Neurofilm Festival is listed no. 22 of 65 entries at
| 02/07/11 | 00:46 AM
the refresh takes the last 30-50 people who have looked at your profile. &Depending on how many friends you have, and how many people look at your profile, that could mean anything from 1 day's worth of people to months worth of people. &However, only the people who pop up again and again are the ones who are really looking at you repeatedly. &
| 02/07/11 | 08:30 AM
I notice one person most persistently in my top 5 because he is dead. &He is certainly not the one in 2,093 looking at me repeatedly over any period of time.
| 02/07/11 | 12:21 PM
Rophuine Usiah (not verified) | 02/07/11 | 20:34 PM
i am often wrong. &i'm happy if i'm right 51% of the time.
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If his name is Aaron, the answer is easy...
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Yes, I have a facebook place. I also know why, and I can tell you: I wanted to know what it is and how it works. Now I know. I know enough to visit it just from time to time - still just to see some of my about 100 so called friends. It is there. I wrote some things there for which somebody can hate me, somebody else might have laughed a bit, so what? I have not told my little facebook everything about me. Neither should you or you or you. Beyond this, who really cares?On the other hand, I wrote something on this site about privacy hysteria, but it takes time to find it, because of the privacy here. I would like to link it or something here. But that is too much work and the link could bring you somewhere else on the page.&I would not mind if you could see all my comments here on science20 in a couple of clicks. I can not see them. My privacy is protected against myself. Should I be glad?
| 05/11/11 | 07:21 AM
Anonymous (not verified) | 05/18/11 | 14:11 PM
Just like you I noticed that there seem to be some kind of patterns and obsessed about trying to figure them out. The one method I didn't think about was inviting everyone to an event, but I've been testing the other ones long before your article. I think there's more people out there who notice this kind of thing.But my conclusion has been: while many times it seems I'm seeing a pattern, many times I see behavior contradicting the pattern I thought I had found. In other words, hard to know for sure.I'm sure facebook collects data on every single thing we do. Even the searches we try. If you search for someone and the person doesn't have a profile, usually few days later results of people with similar names will be stressed in your searches and friend suggestions.A problem with trying to figure out their algorithms innerwork is that they must be kinda complex. Probabilistic, counter-intuitive perhaps(they're not trying to figure out what we would expect them to). Affinity between people for example isn't usually calculated taking positive reciprocity(positive mutual correlation) high into account (like we intuitively do in real life). What I mean is, for example: everything you do and like, that is, 100% of your sample space corresponds to 15% of some chick's. You are very similar to her, but the contrary isn't true. Conversely same thing happens to her concerning other people.But conversely negative correlation must be high into account: If the chick deletes you(but doesn't block you), she won't be appearing in your friends suggestions even if you both have 50% of your friends in common. It had happened to me, I should know. :( &Most of me keeps telling me, "Dude, it's facebook, please get a clue and go use your time and brain power on anything at all more useful", that's when I give it up and go to back my (hopefully)more productive scientific obsessions. :)
| 05/26/11 | 20:00 PM
Anonymous (not verified) | 06/05/11 | 19:33 PM
Unfortunately this way of handling things doesn't work for everyone. I have almost one thousand "friends". Family, friends, friends of friends, people I studied with, worked with, travelled with, played gigs with, done business with, and so on.I risk coming off as rude by unfriending them. Some people don't take it well even though you and them were not close. You know, it's kinda like random social rejection, even though you know that the person rejecting you doesn't even know who you are and may have all sorts of reasons or problems to be acting the way they are, you still feel bad even if only fleetingly.But truth is, noone hardly bothers me in that sense,for I know my way through the privacy settings. And I like being connected to lots of people, this brings possibilities I can't foresee and maybe wouldn't have happened otherwise, like recently jobs I was offered and 'tips'(more like consulting advice) I received for free and really helped me. Also I too got to help a few people there and feel good about myself. :)My opinion is that in this life we must explore, we only got one and it's so passing...
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thanks for the insight.
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He created The Face Book but the actual Facebook people use(d) was not created by Harvard grads and, given its location, likely was more Stanford grads because the programmers coming out of Berkeley are nothing special.&
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&Mark Zuckerberg has said multiple times that this will never be allowed as it goes against their privacy policy. It is also against US privacy laws and European Union Data Protection lawsFacebook has changed their privacy policies without telling anyone too many times to count so what they say is inconsequential. & That bit about not being able to see who who looks at your profile because of any 'law' in the US or Europe was invented by you just now. & &Facebook knows the IP address and referrer for every link to every profile and every action on Facebook. &If they know it, they can show it (should they choose) and it is completely legal to do so. &Facebook is an at-will community and you accept whatever terms they post or you don't and leave.
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"There are three methods to determine who looks at you the most"Is this a joke? This is impossible Ed, and you know it.Cheers Paolo
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Jimmy &come 2 Jburg& Tau, stop embarrassing yourself, u r a TAU not a MoTAUng. U were just an employee of the Motaungs. U were such a dedicated servant, such that u ended up rendering services to your employees even after the normal working hours. U went beyond the call of duty, that's going an extra mile. Yours services in Chimps colours on the soccer field r n longer valued. No matter how hard u tried 2 show your loyalty, one thing is certain: This is a family business. Shut up n smell the coffee, just like some folks who tried to cross the like but were ruined in by the man who did not campaign to b at the helm of the institution
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Jimmy &come 2 Jburg& Tau, stop embarrassing yourself, u r a TAU not a MoTAUng. U were just an employee of the Motaungs. U were such a dedicated servant, such that u ended up rendering services to your employees even after the normal working hours. U went beyond the call of duty, that's going an extra mile. Yours services in Chimps colours on the soccer field r n longer valued. No matter how hard u tried 2 show your loyalty, one thing is certain: This is a family business. Shut up n smell the coffee, just like some folks who tried to cross the like but were ruined in by the man who did not campaign to b at the helm of the institution