Facebook reportedly fired 52 employees for spying on users. This incident occurred between 2014 and 2015.
This news comes from a book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, quoted from BGR, Friday (15/7/2021).
Stories of Employees who Stalk Users
One of the stories from the report was of an engineer who was on vacation in Europe with a woman. After the woman left her from the hotel due to an argument, the employee accessed location data to track her down at another hotel.
Another example is a woman who stopped taking messages after a date with a Facebook engineer.
He also spied on the woman, the engineer had access to private conversations “over the years with the woman’s friends via Facebook Messenger, events she attended, photo uploads including deleted and comment posts or clicked ones.
Even she could checking her location in real time, because the woman has the Facebook app on her phone. In a report, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos had reported this incident to Mark Zuckerberg in September 2015. Stamos told his boss that employees were spying on users almost every month.
Tighten the Employees’ Accsess
At that time, there were more than 16 thousand employees who have access to user data. Stamos also provides a number of recommendations ranging from tightening access to oblige employees to an official request to access the data.
Facebook also has responded to the book’s contents. spokesman Facebook told Insider that it has zero tolerance for abuse and ensures that an has fired every employee found to be accessing data incorrectly.
He also added that since 2015 Facebook has been strengthening the company internally. This includes reducing the need for engineers to access large amounts of data while working.
“Since 2015, we have continued to strengthen employee training, abuse detection and prevention protocols. We have also continued to reduce the need for engineers to access multiple types of data as they work to build and support our services,” he explained.
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