You know, I feel like I conceal my identity pretty well on the internet. I have a bogus facebook, I use different emails for different things and I never disclose my full name anywhere with my online alias (ok well, some of you know my full name, but there's plenty of people with the same last/first name combo so blah).

And then one day I'm just browsing(stalking) facebook and I look at the suggested friends panel, finding properbritishs facebook. Wait what? I've never interacted with ANYONE on this forum with that account and for some reason it says that I MAY JUST KNOW PROPER?

Wat. Da. Fuq?! What data mining is this? To what extent do they use data on the internet to do these things? What's being monitored?

The only link I can see here is my email disclosed in my profile ties into my fake account by being the backup of the email used in the account. Even then, I highly doubt that was the link in establishing this connection, I feel like it was a much more...intrusive method.

Oh boy I know this blog is coming back to haunt me.

This reminds me that I should connect with some of you guys though, instead of just interacting with my long and often boring posts.

(This post was last modified: 01/08/2013 01:56 AM by Tetris999.)

(This post was last modified: 01/08/2013 10:53 AM by eKusoshisut0.)

(01/08/2013 10:53 AM)eKusoshisut0 Wrote:  maybe they used your E-mail address to suggest contacts?

/shrug

Could be, I haven't seen the contacts on that account actually.

And This is why I avoid these kind of sites.

(01/08/2013 01:45 AM)Tetris999 Wrote:  Wat. Da. Fuq?! What data mining is this? To what extent do they use data on the internet to do these things? What's being monitored?

Considering that tracking is pretty much where Facebook derives its revenue from, you can be sure it's pretty extensive.
I mean, stuff like graph search has shown what they can do, and this is publicly shown.  Imagine the stuff they can do behind the scenes.

Every single Facebook Like button is tracking you - that is, merely seeing the button sends info back to Facebook that you visited the page.  You can try having multiple accounts, but I'm sure FB have methods of triangulating that it's really the same person (IP address matching, browser fingerprinting, cookie tracking along with behavioural browsing analysis etc).
Google probably do mostly the same thing - I mean, so many sites have Google Analytics installed, reference the Google CDN, their "+1" button, ads, Chrome, Google DNS and of course, Google search.