I moved recently to this city (4 months ago). I don't have the FB app or use FB on my phone, don't have this city set as my location in my FB profile and didn't check-in into a location on FB. I never allowed FB on my laptop's browser location access. I followed a page from a local comdy club, though.
Other than that, I have WhatsApp and the Oculus app on my phone a. I have an iPhone.
Any ideas how they know that we have been geographically close? Is it possible they use WhatsApp's location info to match this? I have given WhatsApp location access while using the app.
You have a Facebook account, if you don’t check it on your phone presumably you do on your notebook or desktop. You probably browse the internet at home from the same WiFi network with both your computer and phone. Different cookies from the same IP address would indicate the same household. It wouldn’t take a lot more to know they belong to the same person. IP addresses can strongly correlate with a geographic area.
Since nearly every website has those social media buttons Facebook can track you from site to site even if you’re not logged in.
For sure Facebook knows where you live and has matched up your facebook-free phone to your Facebook account.
I’ve got no experience with actually doing any of this, it’s just what seems obvious to me. I’m sure the whole truth of it is much scarier.
I haven’t had a Facebook account in over a decade but my current girlfriend had my ex-girlfriend from 15 years ago pop up in her recommended list. We live about 10,000 km apart.
If there are any Facebook engineers reading this I must salute you. Your work is amazing.
It was WhatsApp.
Tinder and a lot of others apps share information with Facebook about what you do by using their SDK.
What I did do is add those girls’ numbers on WhatsApp - which is a Facebook property - and they suddenly appeared as friend recommendations.
But if there is any definitive proof it’s that I only was recommended the ones that I had messaged on WhatsApp, never those that I had only chatted up on the Tinder app...
But it may be very possible that they do a combination of everything to track you (whatsapp, instagram, facebook, oculus, apps that use the sdk...)
Or if you moved due to work and you got added to a company-wide address book which is also synced to employees' phones and in turn got synced to WhatsApp, Facebook's systems could probably match up names to suggest a connection.
Although, why only these 2 people and not others from the company? Scarily there's probably enough data between you 3 for FB to know that you would be compatible with each other, so maybe Facebook figured the same thing you 3 figured out in real life -- you hung out with each other so I would deduce you found these 2 co-workers interesting. But I doubt anyone got paid to make such sophisticated stuff, there's probably a simpler logic that offers a quantity but not quality of "friends".
I still want to write a short story that starts with a guy saying "OK Google, get me a girlfriend", and an algorithm that slowly pops up suggesting events and locations for him to visit, knowing that a girl that he'd be compatible with will be at the events/locations...
Guess where Facebook thinks I'm living?
They can be pretty sure I either grow up or live in Hackerville.
Also your coworkers probably looked at your FB profile.