Incident 406: Facebook's Friend Suggestion Feature Recommends Patients of Psychiatrist to Each Other

Description: Facebook's "People You May Know" (PYMK) feature was reported by a psychiatrist for recommending her patients as friends through recommendations, violating patients' privacy and confidentiality.

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Alleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed pseudonymized psychiatrist's patients , pseudonymized psychiatrist , patients and healthcare providers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
406
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2015-07-15
Editors
Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Facebook recommended that this psychiatrist's patients friend each other
splinternews.com · 2016

Facebook's ability to figure out the "people we might know" is sometimes eerie. Many a Facebook user has been creeped out when a one-time Tinder date or an ex-boss from 10 years ago suddenly pops up as a friend recommendation. How does the …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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