Replying to Facebook, social engineering and advertising

What the hell.

For the past 4 days, I've seen this same scandalously clad girl on my Facebook Recommended Friends List. I thought little of it till I heard a NPR story, which led me to do a little background check of my own.

This person doesnt exist. Its a fabrication, made by data miners who are out there to get your personal information to sell, for profit, to corporations, who pay out the ass to know what trends you are into. Weird. Really Weird, capital W. "Oh whatever, its random" you think... but its kind of not.

Facebook has disclosed some strange knowledge of how they run their site. Summarizing the NPR story I heard, say a woman hasnt posted much to Facebook recently. Facebook will actually post data feed showing her friends who have posted photos of trips, outings, whatever, with the intent on encouraging her to post photos herself. After a girl posts photo's, Facebook will make these pop up when male friends log in, hoping that a guy might take interest and comment, perhaps sparking interest and getting the girl to become more involved with Facebook in order to keep up on the guys.

But it doesnt stop there. Reverse engineering is apparently common, so if a guy hasn't been attending Facebook as often as he normally has, guess who's photos tend to pop up more often on his feeds... you guessed it.

I kind of dont know how to feel about this, since this is all "opt in" sorta deal, and we all openly volunteer this to this company, but it is weird to think that this can and does apparently go on. I hope this isnt too deep for NSG, but thoughts?