As I said, the popular social networking site is almost undoubtedly making friend requests FROM your account WITHOUT your permission. As far as we at TagSurfer can tell, every case involves two people who have mutual friends. Let me explain further:
It began when a co-worker of mine approached me in the office and asked if I knew a person who we’ll call Jason. Now, it so happens that I am a mutual friend of Jason and the co-worker which is why this co-worker approached me about the situation. He informed me that Jason had recently accepted a friend request that the co-worker did not remember ever sending. After all, the two have never met in real life. Interesting, we thought. A Facebook fluke.
Then I came home from work and checked my own Facebook account. “Michael,” it said, “has accepted your friend request.” It was at this moment when I began to be suspicious. Although, I have no qualms with being Michael’s Facebook friend, I certainly did NOT send Michael a friend request.
Third: I left my home and went over to Nate’s house to record this week’s podcast. Upon recounting these events to him, Nate’s wife piped up.
“That happened to me!” she exclaimed. “I checked my Facebook and it said that Billy AND Xavier accepted my friend requests and I knew I didn’t send them!”
That settles it, Nate and I decided. We alerted some of the larger social media news networks (even Mashable) hoping to get the word out. With any luck they’ll be doing some larger scale investigations soon and we’ll be able to find out more about this. Until then however, our group of loyal fans heard the news here first: Facebook is (probably) making friend requests without your permission.
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And this whole time I thought it was my wife making requests for me.
it happened to me with someone and i dont have a clue who they are, and they have NO mutuals, another odd thing is that just after the new layout i got various notifications from random people who i dont even know, e.g. ‘(insert name here) commented on their post’ and this person wasnt on my friends list and they didnt have any mutual friends, weird huh?
@ sam: That is weird. It hasn’t happened to us for a while and though it’s happened to pretty much everyone I know by now, nobody with investigative powers ever looked into it. (Good job, Mashable. Way to get on things.) Sounds like the problem’s getting worse.
I think that this practice is completely wrong and it just happened tome to0!! The facebook people should relax and leave people alone… is their “company” not growing fast enough for them?
@Pat: It’s so weird that the issue hasn’t gone away by this point and, like you, I can’t figure out why it’s happening. What does Facebook really have to gain by linking people who don’t know each other? If you have any ideas, let me know.
This happens to me frequently, often producing awkward situations (i.e. – I teach, and a student accepts a friend request I did not make).
Is there any chance that this is tied to event invitations somehow? When I create events via fb and invite people, I often use email addresses that I have in addition to existing fb friends. Anyone notice a connection?
That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that. We’ll keep our eyes out and see if we notice a connection. One thing I can say is that if it is tied to event invitations, it’s not exclusively limited to those situations. When we first put out this article for example, neither Nate nor I had recently made any event invitations.
It’s also happened to my girlfriend 2 days ago: she had a popup with “XXX accepted your request …” but she never did that request!
This happend to me the other day and my boyfriend and I got in a huge fight because of the whole situation! This was the first time facebook has ever really done anything strange to me and I am still very upset about the way things turned out considering…
Wow, I hope everything turned out OK even though Facebook tried to sabotage your relationship. To add to the weirdness of it, most of us have had our fb accounts for a while now and haven’t gone through the process of setting up a new account. We set up a new account for a video training course at work the other day with a fake name like Kenny Kangaroo. 30 minutes later we had 4 friend requests. Granted, during that time the profile wasn’t private. Looks like now we have facebook spammers/scammers too.