I love Facebook. My page -- part diary, part cocktail party, part think tank -- has become a place where friends, acquaintances and complete strangers come together and joke, flirt, share stories and have really smart and often tough conversations about everything from sex and love to gender and race. I also love that I'm never sure who is going to pop up in my feed and when I'm bored or avoiding doing something more important, I scroll through my "People You May Know" box on the off chance I'll bump into someone from my past or find someone I might want to be a part of my future.
But mostly my friend suggestions involve people I don't know and fall into one of these four categories: guys who look like models, guys who look like porn stars, drag queens and guys who look like models that do drag porn. At least that was true until last night. And then everything changed and all of a sudden I noticed that my "People You May Know" box was overrun with a decade's worth of guys that I've dated or hooked up with and then promptly forgot about or actively took great pains to avoid.
There was the guy who was so arrogant that despite him having one of the prettiest dicks I've ever held in my left hand, I couldn't make it past a second date with him. There was the guy who didn't get any of my jokes and lived in what I imagine Freddy Krueger's basement bachelor pad would probably look like. And there was the guy who literally chewed on my tongue while we were making out and not in a good way.
Suddenly my vague work contacts were side by side with people I've seen naked. So, why is this happening and how do we make it stop? Facebook is infamously cagey when it comes to explaining their algorithms and didn't immediately respond to a request for a statement but it appears that the social media site is using our contacts in our phones to put us back in touch with people we may have purposefully forgotten about. Someone in my comments section mentioned that you can go to this page and see the imported phone numbers and delete them.
However, he also noted that "even if you didn't sync your phone book, if you provide your phone number to Facebook, you might get matched with other folks who have you in their phonebooks. So if you want to completely opt out, you need to take your phone number off Facebook.
