Comment by techdragon

Having a profile you can "claim" is a feature, just look at IMDB actor profiles if you want a more understandable example that's not reliant on Facebook's creepy surveillance. It's not creepy to Facebook that they gather the info ergo they see no reason to not create the absentee profile since to them the profile is "look we've already done all this work for you" type bait for the few remaining internet users not on Facebook.