The Facebook Panopticon
I have a seekrit Facebook account to keep in touch with a few school buddies who only keep in touch with each other over Facebook. Being my typically paranoid self, I have as little of my personal information on there as possible: fake birthdate, fake name, and so on. Today, Facebook offered up a suggestion that I add as a friend an ex-coworker at the place I used to work at two years ago. I have no Facebook connection to the workplace, just to the school buddies. None of the school buddies worked at that place. The ex-coworker got out of school and married and settled years ago.
This leads to the question: How the hell did they do that? Also, which departments of which governments and corporations have access to this technology? And how can I get my hands on this power to abuse it for my own selfish interests?
I assume that part of the formula is based on my IP-derived geographic location, since that's about the only thing I can think of that would match and be in the Facebook database. I doubt that it's matching on techie keywords from wall talk because I've been posting twitter shit. Facebook does have one real e-mail address of mine that they could probably match to a third-party data mine that might have my whole life history in it, or they could use it to search the web and pull down information tying me to the job and the ex-coworker.