Creepy Facebook urges users to pester friends about their SEX LIVES

Stalking-as-a-service: What the Zuck?

Facebook users are now encouraged to ask fellow Facebookers to reveal details about their relationships if they haven't already dished the dirt on their love lives.

In other words, by clearing the way for stalker types to ask acquaintances creepy questions, Facebook's data mining just got lazier.

Yes, please do ask me about my relationship. Don't let the fact that I haven't declared it yet dissuade you from pestering (Credit: Mashable)

It really is a tool geared towards very casual friends on the network, because real-life chums would presumably already know if their pal was hooked up with someone, or else single and possibly available for a date.

But, more pertinently, Facebook is urging its vast userbase to help fill in the blanks in its massive database. Some holdouts decline to provide details such as sexual orientation, hometown, phone number and music preferences. That simply doesn't sit right with Zuck, who wants to "connect the world" not for altruistic reasons, but more to scrape as much cash as possible from targeted adverts to please Wall Street.

To achieve that, the free-content ad network needs to gather as much data as it can about the 1.25 billion people who use the site and app at least once a month.

It already started nudging users to ask other users to reveal more about themselves on their profiles in the last few months. But the relationship status, er, poke is the latest tactic to flush more details out of the slightly more privacy-conscious types on the network.

Apparently, the new feature will be rolled out over the next few weeks, so horny Brits can't start flirting with others on Facebook via that method just yet.

Mashable, which has seen the new functionality in action, reports that when someone clicks on the "ask" button, they must also send a question, such as "want to grab a drink sometime?" The user is also prompted to publicly share their relationship status, or else just reveal it to the person creepily doing the asking.

A side effect of all this: it's possible that Facebook is finally getting into the dating game. What next? Might it want to be married to Tinder? ®