It's not surprising. Remember that I have already related what happened
to me when I first signed up with Facebook. I didn't know that I had
finished creating my account when I was given the list of suggested
friends. So I sent them all friend requests and right off from the very
first I got in trouble with Facebook for sending friend requests to
people I didn't know. The names did sound vaguely familiar, though, and
since I set up my account by following an invitation from the state
library commission I thought they were employees at the library
commission. The only one who accepted my friend request was Kim Loftis
and it turned out that she was a fellow subscriber to the Stream users
list at the time. It's not really that eerie. Facebook obviously does a
background search for your name and email address and has an algorithm
that looks for things associated with you. Anymore the friend
suggestions have gotten a bit more obvious about where they come from.
For the most part they are friends of people whom I have already
friended or friends of friends. But also some names pop up that I have
no idea where they come from until I start looking at their profiles and
I can see that their political leanings are at least vaguely something
like mine. I wonder if Facebook would adjust their algorithms a bit if
they knew that they were helping lefties network. The advertising is
getting better too. When I first signed up I was getting ads for dating
sites for people over fifty. Now I am getting ads for things related to
blindness and for books. A lot of these ads could not be related to my
activity on Facebook itself, so they are apparently still following me
around the web. By the way, I always use the mobile site. It is
tremendously easier if you are using a screen reader. If you find
yourself on the regular site, no matter what Facebook page, all you have
to do is to go to the address field of your browser and replace the www
with an M and press enter. The main site has a few settings that the
mobile site doesn't have, but they are settings that I don't care to
change. As long as you have an account now, though, try going back and
doing some searches for groups, pages or profiles of things you might be
interested in. It's similar to subscribing to an email group except that
you don't get the emails. You just go back to your account and read the
posts that will show up on your news feed. Like I have said, Facebook is
so vast it is like an Internet of its own inside the Internet. You can
find just about anything.
On 11/27/2017 10:48 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
So, I want to tell you how eerie Facebook is. Actually, I guess that even
though I love that all these books are now available to me, in other ways,
technology as made the world a terrifying place.
I was trying to sign a petition the other day and was taken to a Facebook
page rather than a "sign here" button. So I looked at the page and it said
something about creating an account. So because I was there, I thought I'd
see if I could do it, but I couldn't because there was a visual captcha. I
should have just dropped the whole thing at that point because I really
don't want to be on Facebook. But I was curious about how all these other
blind people were getting on Facebook so I asked on the Jaws list, and
someone told me to use the Facebook mobile site. So I tried, just to see if
I could. I did most of it, but then it asked me to verify my email address
with my Optimum email address and password. I did that and it didn't accept
the password. So I was done. But no, I wasn't done because then I got an
email asking me to confirm my account. I followed the link but didn't see
anywhere to confirm my account. But what I did see was a huge number of
names of people whom I might know. And here is the scarey part. I did know
some of those names. One or two were people I actually know. One was an NLS
narrator. Some were old adoption clients. Some were members of email lists
I'm on. Some I didn't recognize. Scarey! I left the website and went back to
the email and went to the unsubscribe link. And thought I unsubscribed from
further email notifications and I'd never filled in the confirmation code
because I'd not found a place to do that. But a few seconds later, I
received an email telling me that I now have a Facebook account. I have an
account I'll never use.
One other scarey thing. It is really true that when I ordered something from
Amazon after several years of not ordering anything, and my Visa card number
had been changed this past year so that Amazon should not have had it
because I never ordered anything from Amazon with this card number, Amazon
did have it without my ever giving it to them.
And when I checked today to be sure that I had the correct phone number for
Drugstore.com, before the correct result, Google inserted an Amazon add for
"Drugs from Amazon" because I ordered a little speaker from Amazon the other
day.
Horrible!
Miriam
