Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I'm convinced that FB and IG sometimes put non-friends who you look at in one another's "people you might know" lists. I had a creepy co-worker once who was always pressuring me for various details about my life -- the kind of person who I suspected might indulge in online sleuthing about me, in other words -- and despite having no friends in common he was constantly popping up as a "person you might know."
Yeah, I think if you're going to do Facebook or Instagram sleuthing, it's dumb to do it while logged in with your real account because I do think sometimes the suggested friends can give it away. If you aren't connected to someone, might as well just look at their public profile while not logged in, or logged in with a dummy account.
I used to do background checks professionally and I had dummy accounts on all the social media sites for this specific purpose. But I discovered it's addictive -- poking around in strangers' social media inevitably led to me using those dummy accounts to look up friends, colleagues, former classmates, crushes, etc. It's a horrible black hole! I remember once becoming semi-obsessed with a high school classmate after discovering she is a bit of an IG influencer. I started looking at her account multiple times a day just to gawk. At first it was funny but eventually it feels weird. I had to go cold turkey and canceled all those dummy accounts because it was just a time suck and I didn't even enjoy it anymore, it was just compulsive.