facebook: just like Pepperidge Farm

…it remembers. But in a much more creepy way than a pleasant elder reminiscing about the good ol’ days.

Right on the tail end of writing about Twitter following in Facebook’s shoes with their Who To Follow recommendations, Facebook decided to up the ante a bit when it comes to making sure every profile has some easily marketable breadcrumbs. It’s been pointed out–quite eloquently–that a service becomes a social media giant by not listening to its users and I can accept that. The only way a service changes is when the superusers develop a movement for it… or more importantly when there’s money to be had.

This morning, while checking up on my friends’ updates, I noticed that Facebook’s recommendations looked a little familiar. There were still the random and “friends-in-common” pages, but I also noticed it suggesting items that I actually liked. Music, books, movies and television shows to be precise. I was intrigued until I realized that these were the exact items that I’d removed from my profile months ago in an effort to cut back on the marketing offers and faux friend requests.

A while back, Facebook caught a bit of flak when a change in their Terms of Service implied that users of the service gave up ownership of the content they posted, status updates, photos, messages, etc. This was quickly clarified, but a statement was added to point out that Facebook does archive your profile information and retain it even if you delete your profile.

I could understand this if I had access to my own revisions, similar to a profile content management system, so I could see older versions of my profile info. But the current “understanding” was that when I delete information from my profile, it’s gone–archived, sure, but gone. Apparently that’s not how they see it and will now offer up my deleted items on a regular basis: “Would you like to Like something that you Liked before, but stopped Liking? We’d really like it if you did… Like it… again.”*