[yaur]

This is almost certainly the "phonebook" hypothesis.

If Lisa has her phone number associated with her Facebook account and either Lisa or the client has the others phone number in their smart phones contacts and the Facebook app installed that relationship can pop up in people you may know. If there aren't good "people you may know" suggestions the ones you get can end up being "people who may be known to people you know".

The reason I think this is because a therapist friend of mind had this exact problem and deleting her cell phone number from her Facebook profile made it stop.

What Lisa (and anyone else with a professional responsibility to protect client privacy) need to do is to stop associating the phone number they give to clients with Facebook or other social media.

[chejazi]

> What Lisa (and anyone else with a professional responsibility to protect client privacy) need to do is to stop associating the phone number they give to clients with Facebook or other social media.

Understanding how Facebook connects different people might help prevent this from happening, but as Facebook's tech becomes more advanced/pervasive Facebook will need to provide an explicit feature to protect user privacy for situations like this. As it stands, the implications of sharing your phone number, location, etc are already far from explicit.

[Dylan16807]

That might help, but facebook is still fully capable of seeing that the clients have the same number in both of their phone books.

[yaur]

And at the point that they start using that its 100% a Facebook problem, but I don't believe that they are at this point.

[Dylan16807]

I see both methods of matching people to friends-of-friends as equally invasive, to be honest.