Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Facebook continually wants me to complete my profile. Well, sorry FB, but I don’t want to. I really don’t think it’s any of your business where I went to school (how many decades ago was that?), where I grew up, where I work, etc. and I’m not going to tell you. My friends and family who might need to know either already know or can ask me directly and I’ll tell them. But honestly, of what concern is that past history to anyone else?

So it’s with some delight that I realise that FB knows very little about me and tries to predict what it does know from the people I interact with (see the images below). The problem with these automated ‘predictions’ is that like most people I know, I have far-ranging and not necessarily overlapping groups of people I ‘know’ on FB. There’s my family scattered in Australia and the US mostly, there are my fellow professionals scattered right across the world, there are people I’ve worked with in various companies, and there are my quilting buddies who are also scattered across the world. And there are some others too, but those groups I listed would cover most of my FB ‘friends’.

As an example of how FB’s predictions about me are wildly off the mark, try these:

Ummmm… neither. Ever.

I’ve only heard of two of these and have definitely not attended any of them. Besides, high school was SUCH a long time ago who on earth cares?

Where’s Mordialloc? Never been there or travelled through there as far as I know. And while I may have lived in Perth, I didn’t ‘grow up’ there.

Well, I driven through Austin (over the top of it on the interstate is the closest I’ve come to that fair city), and I’ve never even heard of Sugar House in Utah, though I did visit Utah once LONG before FB came along. And while I lived in Perth for some years, I sure didn’t grow up there, and left there long before I joined FB.