14 DAY TRIAL // For some reason Facebook seems intent to increase the number of your virtual social connections, and in order to achieve this, it is now calling upon one of its subsidiary companies.
Facebook introduced the "People you may know" feature back in 2008, and not many users were pleased to see that the social platform was recommending them to befriend people they were purposely trying to avoid.
Now the company decided to take things one step further and started suggesting friends using Instagram, the social networking site that it acquired back in 2012.
So, it is now possible for you to actually recognize some of the people that appear in your suggestion list as they are most likely the Instagram users that you are following.
However, this is not a first. There are users who noticed that the social media platform was asking them to befriend people they had met on Tinder or on Grindr. This is because Facebook makes sure to continuously sync your phone book so that any new person that you add to it will also appear under People you may know.
If you want to avoid such situations where you are asked to make friends with someone you had a one-night stand with after hooking up on a dating app, then it is probably better to remove your phone number from Facebook.
Facebook has been rather scarce on details
Since people took notice of this new function before Facebook made any official announcement, The Daily Dot contacted a representative to inquire about their decision to use Instagram for their friends suggestions option.
However, they were not very keen on elaborating on the matter, merely stating that they had only recently launched this feature in an attempt to make their algorithm more efficient.
Either way, it would have probably been better if the ever-invasive Facebook had let users know of the change before they took notice of it themselves. The good thing is that if you find this feature too intrusive, and if you are unwilling to connect with the people you are following on Instagram on Facebook as well, you can always unlink the two accounts.