This is because when you click a shared TikTok link, your account and the sharer's accounts are associated in a social graph. The sharer will see your account as a suggested friend and vice versa.
No sharing link needed. Before I deleted my Facebook account more than a decade ago, it was already suggesting random people I met once IRL and are at least two hops away in terms of existing FB relationships. I had very few friends (~20 IIRC).
Id suggest FB & co also uses location tracking & proximity to expand their social graph continuosly?
Most people just dont care about these privacy settings, and if you have a vast number of users, it doesnt matter if ther are 10% "techsavy people" because the mass is just big enough to create profiles on which you then easily can compute/guess other connections & joints in the social graph.
Yes, that’s my assumption, although IIRC I never gave FB location permissions, so it might be temporarily sharing an IP address by being on the same WiFi or something. Come to think of it they had access to WiFi SSIDs as well in the early days even when location permissions were off.
