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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

No, this is more like you are friends with your conservative Republican boss on facebook, but you are also a member of an abortion rights activist group.

You've never disclosed that activity to Facebook, but they harvested your data via one of those sleazy commercial personal information brokers and added it to your 'shadow profile' without your knowledge.

Then one day your boss downloads his data using that feature, and he suddenly sees that you are unreal37@abortionrights.org and your phone number there.

He then calls you to tell you that not only are you fired, but your wedding to his daughter is canceled.

This is a truly egregious bug (although I think it is probably true that few of the potential 6 million victims have actually had their info leak in this way).

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Yeah, nice false stereotyping with the contrived conservative smearing.

In reality, we all know that the left are far more intolerant than the majority of conservatives. And they are also the ones who get in your face with vile insults, screams, graffiti, vandalism, and any other behavior that passes when one believes their desired ends justifies their means.

It is far more believable that a leftist would be likely to call for and delight in the firing of someone who holds moral values. Conservatives generally just want to be left alone, and they would not in good conscience vindictively fire someone.

And for ends justifying the means, look no further than apologists for murders by folks like Stalin, Lenin, and Guevara. Some actually do say that was what was needed in order for revolution. Disgusting, but that's what they say.

I don't for one moment believe that 90% of Americans have one of two sets of beliefs, is this why this is contrived? This does read like a flame, I assure you it's not, puzzled foreigner.

It's contrived because his scenario of a conservative business owner firing a liberal employee is something he made up as an example to fit into his worldview.

In reality, the political witchhunts and thought policing are overwhelmingly leftist behaviors.

Oh for fuck's sake. Feel free to change "conservative" to "vegan Kucinich voter" and "abortion rights" to "baby seal hunting club" if it makes you feel better.

It's just the first example that came to mind of an affiliation that this bug might expose that the user would really rather not have been.

> Stalin, Lenin, and Guevara

Wow.

Thanks. Not sure about your second bit though - I've never thought about it that way, but I'd have said that every part of the political spectrum was just as bad. Especially in the world today.

How would the unreal37 email get linked to your Facebook profile? I'm not understanding that part of it.

AFAICT, they haven't told anybody exactly where they get the data about you that you don't give them. Presumably, they buy it from one of the commercial personal information brokers that maintain dossiers on consumers and sell that info. Or they might enter into information-trading arrangements; I don't know.

The article only says that they 'harvest' information about you from external non-facebook sources and then add that to the secret internal profile that they maintain about you.

As I understand it:

1) Another friend had your name and your phone number or email address in a contact list.

2) Facebook got access to that contact list.

3) Facebook matched your entry in your friend's contact list to your Facebook account.

4) Facebook added any new numbers or email addresses of yours that your friend had (but that Facebook didn't) to your profile, but not anywhere you could ever see them.

I imagine two major sources of this contact data are 1) Facebook phone apps that access user contact lists, and 2) the functionality in which you give Facebook your email address and email password and Facebook logs in and scours your email for the addresses of your contacts.

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