2018 has been a year of weddings in my family. My sister got married. A close cousin got hitched too. The shopping, the preparations, the numerous functions were all so much fun.
Indian weddings mean that several new members are added to your extended family. You get to meet so many people. And then there is the stroke of serendipity of meeting long-lost friends/family who happen to be invited by the other side. It’s a small world! 
Now, after my sister’s wedding a few of the groom’s cousins/friends popped up on my Facebook friend’s suggestion list. It was strange, as there were no mutual friends. I hadn’t yet added my brother-in-law. Well what do you know! I thought Facebook had worked it out with a neat algorithm considering my sister and BIL were friends.
Then came my cousin’s wedding. After all the ceremonies were over, there was again an update in my Facebook friends suggestion list. This time it was even more strange. Complete random faces that I saw at the wedding. There was no mutual network.
So there was only one common factor that Facebook considered to conclude that the person could be an acquaintance. The location.! The said persons were at the same location- Sangeet, wedding, reception for an extended time. This helped Facebook establish that I knew them.
That is interesting..! And scary..! 
While at times it could be useful to keep in touch with people, imagine how our profile would pop up on random people’s pages just because we were at the same location multiple times. Violation of privacy! I know what you are thinking! Once our profile is out there, we should just forget our rights to privacy! Agreed.
But this sounds even more unsafe. So if this piece of info is bothering you, you can turn off Facebook’s access to your location. And ‘believe’ that our profile is safe to ‘an extent’. 
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