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Is Facebook Spying on My E-Mail?Slate's new tech advice column answers your questions about social networking, syncing your mail, and more.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 10:16 AM ET

A few months ago I asked people to submit their vexing, perplexing, and just plain weird tech questions. I got a bunch of great ones, and I've picked the most interesting and (I'm hoping) the most universal for my inaugural tech advice column. I'm planning to do one question-and-answer column a month. So if you've got a tech dilemma, please send a note to with "I've got a tech question!" as the subject line. (Your question may be edited.)

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Dear Farhad,
Lately Facebook's friend suggestions have been creeping me out. I help coach a girl's basketball team, and Facebook has twice recommended that I friend parents of players. But how did Facebook know that I knew them? Their names could only have come from our team mailing list. I've previously used Facebook's friend-finder service—which accesses your e-mail to look for possible social-networking connections—but that was long before my association with the basketball team. Facebook promised it wouldn't store my e-mail password. Was it lying? Did Facebook access my Yahoo account to learn about the team?

—Can't Stand Facebook Spying

Dear Can't Stand,
I get this question quite frequently, and I've wondered about it myself, too. Facebook's friend suggestions often make sense—many of the site's recommendations depend on obvious social connections. If Tom is friends with Harry and Louise, and Dick is friends with Harry and Louise as well, then Facebook assumes that Tom and Dick probably know each other, too. Every so often, though, Facebook will recommend someone who isn't a friend of a friend: your plumber, your pool boy, your travel agent. And because people often give Facebook access to their e-mail contacts when they first join the site, these suggestions raise a lot of hackles: Facebook must be peeking in my e-mail!

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, says that's not the case. Facebook doesn't store your password; it has no way of going into your e-mail to check for new relationships. So how does the site learn about the connection between you and your plumber? Because your plumber let Facebook look in his e-mail, and Facebook found your name there. "If someone imports their contacts and your name is found, you might get a recommendation to be their friend," Schnitt says. In your case, Can't Stand, the basketball parents likely allowed Facebook to look at their contacts; Facebook found your name there and made a recommendation.

Schnitt also points out that Facebook's friend suggestions are secret—if you choose to ignore the recommendation that you friend your plumber, your plumber will never find out.

—Farhad

Dear Farhad,
Facebook recently blocked me from adding friends—it said I'd been adding too many friends too quickly. After I was blocked, Facebook's message didn't tell me how long I have to wait before I can start adding friends again. It's been four days. All this seems draconian.

—Just Too Friendly

Dear Too Friendly,
I ran your problem by Facebook's Schnitt, and he says that you likely tripped up Facebook's anti-spam systems. The social network keeps on the lookout for botlike behavior—friending too promiscuously, sending out lots of messages too quickly, updating your status like crazy. It's possible for Facebook's security algorithms to mistakenly finger real people for bots, but you'd have to be doing something very unusual—and, therefore, pretty annoying—for that to happen. Schnitt says that in many cases, full access is restored after a few days. And remember—after you're back up and running, slow down.

—Farhad

Dear Farhad,
A few months ago my wife's HP laptop crashed for the third and seemingly last time. We wouldn't miss it, except there are several dozen photos of our son on that hard drive. I can't recycle the laptop until we figure out how to extract the irreplaceable photos.

The laptop seems to boot up when I press the power button and I can hear the disc spinning, but nothing happens on the screen. I have tried connecting the laptop to our LCD monitor with a cable, but it doesn't recognize the new source. I know next to nothing about removing hardware from a laptop. I have called a couple of computer shops, and they want $50 minimum just to take a look and determine whether they can do anything about it. How do we easily access data from a hard drive that is stuck in a laptop that won't display anything?

—Not Without My Photos

Dear Not Without,
Whether you can get those photos depends on how the machine met its end. If it was the hard drive that crashed, you might have trouble finding your data. If there's some other problem that's preventing the machine from booting up, your photos are likely completely intact.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

COMMENTS

Buying an external hard-drive enclosure to access the hopefully intact data on the laptop's hard drive was a pretty good advice.

However, there is a pit-fall: The drive's interface is either ide (likely if the laptop is older than 2-3 years) or s-ata (likely if it is a newer laptop). So this needs to be checked first in order to buy the appropriate external hard-drive enclosure. It's probably best to remove the drive and take it to the store - somebody should be able to help (if the clerks aren't tech-savvy enough, then there's hopefully a nerdy customer around).

-- Rumo
(To reply, click here)

Great column, as usual, but does anyone else think Farhad's cartoon pic looks sort of like Jeff Goldblum?

-- jking323
(To reply, click here)

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