Releasing today, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by co-authors Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang takes readers deep into the last five years of Facebook, with startling revelations. Facebook has been the topic of heavy criticism over the last few years as lawmakers began to grapple with the social media platform’s very real impact on the current political landscape. And as the law slowly threatens to catch up, Facebook is taking steps to show the company can self-police its own platform, despite it being implicated in violent uprisings.
This all comes at a time when Facebook is doing everything it can to get onto as many devices as possible. Whether by creating new features to mimic other popular social apps and services or creating whole new devices, Facebook desperately wants to assure users that the social media platform will continue to be the premier app for online communication.
Perhaps one of the most unnerving parts of the book, as reported by Insider, is a section focusing on multiple cases of Facebook engineers accessing user data to stalk and harass users. According to the book, most of the 52 employees fired between January 2014 and August 2015 were “men who looked up the Facebook profiles of women they were interested in.” One such incident allegedly involved a Facebook engineer who used his access to collect information on a woman he had gone on a date with after she stopped responding to his messages. According to the book he had access to “years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on.” The book authors also claim he was able to track her location in real-time using the Facebook app on her phone.
According to the book, Facebook’s reasoning for giving employees unregulated access to so much user data was to “cut away the red tape” and help engineers do their jobs. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly made aware of the issue back in 2015 when former Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos identified it as a problem happening “nearly every month.” When Stamos told Zuckerberg of the issue, 16,000 employees had access to private user data. The book alleges that Zuckerberg said finding a solution to this problem was “a top priority” and gave Stamos a year to fix things. However, according to an anonymous employee who spoke with the book's authors, any solution that would have limited the amount of personal data harvested by Facebook would be denied as they were “antithetical to Mark’s DNA.”
A Facebook spokesperson responded to Insider with a statement saying “Since 2015, we've continued to strengthen our employee training, abuse detection, and prevention protocols. We're also continuing to reduce the need for engineers to access some types of data as they work to build and support our services.” Facebook really wants to make sure users know any mishandling of private information and leaks are not coming from within the company. Instead, users only need to be worried about the disinformation and extremist groups allowed on the site.
It might not be surprising that these issues would arise from a company with a CEO that asked employees to “move fast and break things" during Facebook's early years. Things have changed a lot since Facebook's startup days, but it seems as though Facebook continued to trust its engineers with a ridiculous amount of user data, and allegedly without much meaningful oversight, for perhaps longer than it should have. While reported instances of this kind of behavior have died down in recent years, this is important information for users to consider when deciding to log in to Facebook.
Source: Insider
