This past summer Facebook relocated from University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA—where several buildings fan out along the downtown strip—to a new central office in Stanford Research Park. A good friend and two-year veteran of Facebook invited me to check out the new space. When I arrived, a security guard handed me a non-disclosure contract to fill out, a requirement to enter the building. “Just making sure you’re not a Twitter spy,” he said. I can therefore not describe the tour my friend gave, though photos of the new space abound on the Internet. Afterwards, we went out for a drink at the Dutch Goose, a bar popular with techies and Stanford graduate students, where most of this conversation took place. Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.
***
The Rumpus: On your servers, do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?
Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment. The only reason we’re changing that is for performance reasons. When you make any sort of interaction on Facebook—upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information—
Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?
Employee: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with.
Rumpus: In other words, the person you stalk the most.
Employee: No, it’s more than just that. It’s also messages, file posts, photos you’re tagged in with them, as well as your viewing of their profile and all of that. Essentially, we judge how good of a friend they are to you.
Rumpus: When did Facebook make this change?
Employee: That was actually fairly recently, sometime in the last three months. But other than that, we definitely store snapshots, which is basically a picture of all the data on all of our servers. I want to say we do that every hour, of every day of every week of every month.
Rumpus: So this is every viewable screen?
Employee: It’s way more than that: it’s every viewable screen, with all the data behind every screen. So when we store your photos, we have six versions of your photos. We don’t store the original: we make six different versions on the photo uploader and upload those six versions.
Rumpus: And the difference between them would be sizing, certain areas are zoomed—
Employee: Exactly. Different sizes for the news feed, your profile pic, enlargement.
Rumpus: And these reside on servers in your office?
Employee: No, not in our office. Absolutely not. We have four data centers around the world. There’s one in Santa Clara, one in San Francisco, one in New York and one in London. And in each of those, there are approximately five to eight thousand servers. Each co-location of our servers has essentially the same data on it.
Rumpus: And how many users are you up to now?
Employee: That I can disclose publicly? Two hundred to two hundred twenty million.
Rumpus: And actually?
Employee: That’s just active users. As far as total accounts, including those that are potentially fake, disabled and whatnot, we’re over three hundred million. The two hundred twenty million are users who have logged on and done something with the site in the last thirty days.
Rumpus: You said they’re changing the policy of keeping all information.
Employee: No. They’re never changing that policy. We still keep all information. What I was referring to, is that if anything, we’re going to start deleting more photos for performance reasons. We are the largest photo distributor in the world.
Rumpus: Really? Is that obvious?
Employee: I don’t know the exact figures off the top of my head, but I want to say upwards of a trillion photos, and then think about six copies of each. This is the epitome of a needle in a haystack. When we need to load a webpage in half a second, we need to go and find upwards of a thousand photos—think about your newsfeed—in one get [snaps], and instantaneously. It’s hard to do.
Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.
Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.
I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.
Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?
Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.
Rumpus: What did they do?
Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired.
Rumpus: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account?
Employee: I have. For engineering reasons.
Rumpus: Have you ever done it outside of professional reasons?
Employee: I will say, when I first started working there, yes. I used it to view other people’s profiles which I didn’t have permission to visit. I never manipulated their data in any way; however, I did abuse the profile viewing permission at several initial points when I started at Facebook.
Rumpus: How about reading their messages?
Employee: Never individually like that. I would mostly just look at profiles.
Rumpus: Would you suppose that Facebook employees might read people’s messages?
Employee: See, the thing is—and I don’t know how much you know about it—it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.
Rumpus: So the master password is basically irrelevant.
Employee: Yeah.
Rumpus: It’s just for style.
Employee: Right. But it’s no longer in use. Like I alluded to, we’ve cracked down on this lately, but it has been replaced by a pretty cool tool. If I visited your profile, for example, on our closed network, there’s a ‘switch login’ button. I literally just click it, explain why I’m logging in as you, click ‘OK,’ and I’m you. You can do it as long as you have an explanation, because you’d better be able to back it up. For example, if you’re investigating a compromised account, you have to actually be able to log into that account.
Rumpus: Are your managers really on your ass about it every time you log in as someone else?
Employee: No, but if it comes up, you’d better be able to justify it. Or you will be fired.
Rumpus: I would imagine they take this—
Employee: Pretty seriously. I don’t really fuck around, at all.
Rumpus: They invented a Chief Officer position for it, Chris Kelly, right?
Employee: Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, correct. Running for Attorney General of California.
Rumpus: Is that a standard position at Silicon Valley web companies?
Employee: I think it’s becoming more of a standard officer position, especially with Web 2.0, 3.0, where the model is basically get as much information out there as you can. Obviously, someone needs to step back and make sure there is some information privacy here, or at least as much as we can put in place.
Rumpus: Facebook was probably a big trendsetter in that regard, right?
Employee: In my opinion, we’ve always provided the most nitty-gritty user privacy settings from the beginning. There’s no other site out there that’s this customizable.
Rumpus: Would you like to give your take on the last few rounds of fuck ups, Facebook Beacon, and the recent Terms of Service controversy?
Employee: It’s really hard to judge exactly the way users are going to react. We just didn’t have a good enough beta-testing system in place. When you have a group of twenty engineers working on a project, they think it’s the most beautiful, immaculate thing in the world, and then they build it, and a project manager approves it. Initially, when that was the case, we just pushed it, and if users didn’t like it we pulled it back. That was just our philosophy, one of trial and error. Whereas now we’ve started running psychological analysis, starting to…
Rumpus: Oh really?
Employee: Fuck yeah. Are you kidding me? We do eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while you browse Facebook.
Rumpus: What do you mean by “eye-tracking”?
Employee: For example, when we want to introduce new features, like when we streamlined the browsing of photo albums, you know, where you can click ‘next’ above the photo, and the page stays the same except you get the next photo? We did tests on that, and actually found out it increased the number of page views by 77%, essentially because we were reducing 77% of the page load, and therefore it was loading faster, and thus generating more clicks. We not only reduced our bandwidth, and how much we have to pay for our Internet, but we made the site faster and increased the clicks-per-minute, which is what we’re truly interested in.
Rumpus: So in what other ways do you track behavior, that isn’t necessarily obvious to users?
Employee: We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth.
Rumpus: So maybe you know about this, maybe you don’t. There’s a paradox with international expansion, because obviously all internet companies aspire to a worldwide market, but as service enters countries without great infrastructure, such as third-world countries, the companies have to provide the infrastructure and the countries don’t actually produce any (or much) ad revenue.
Employee: I don’t know anything about that, actually. The one comment I would make about that, is that we’ve definitely tried to continue expanding to third-world countries. Take Iran—well, Iran is not a third-world country—but when the Iranian elections came up, and then the disputes, we found out they were using Facebook as a tool to organize themselves and expose their qualms and discontent with the government. So publicly we translated the entire site into Farsi within thirty-six hours. It was our second right-to-left language, which was actually really difficult for us. Literally the entire site is flipped in a mirror. The fact that we did it in thirty-six hours—they hired twenty some-odd translators, and engineers worked around the clock to get it rolled out—was pretty fucking phenomenal. We had at least three times as many user registrations per day the first day it was out, and it has been growing. So we’re definitely still serious about foreign outreach. And the thing is, we have such a gigantic market share in the larger sections of Europe, in Australia, in Mexico, in the States and Canada, and that’s where 99.9% of our ad revenue is and probably will be always—or at least will be the next five, ten years. So the fact that we’re breaching into these other markets mostly means just allowing family and friends to connect even more deeply, which is really our ultimate goal.
Rumpus: What’s the creepiest Facebook interaction you have had?
Employee: Well, the weirdest one I’ve ever seen was one I was able to investigate, one of the situations which required me to log into other accounts. This guy had emailed my friend at school a very very odd message, pertaining to the name ‘Caitlin,’ which is her name, and ‘poop.’ It was literally one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen: a two-page message about the name ‘Caitlin’ and its semantic relation to ‘poop.’ We found out that he had actually sent it to the first two hundred Caitlins he found on Facebook search.
Rumpus: That’s weird.
Employee: Really weird. Out of nowhere, no reasoning. He started sending it twenty times a day, to different Caitlins, for three weeks or so.
Rumpus: What’s the most bizarre?
Employee: I found a fake account created from Berkeley that used the profile picture and information from the brother of one of my very good friends. We looked up the guy who created the original profile, and he had never ever heard of him, never ever met him, obviously had never seen him. But this guy had evidently added him as a friend, and sadly he accepted it, but literally stole all of this guy’s information, created a fake account, and was communicating with himself from the fake account. He was writing on his wall and posting back to the “other person’s” wall. We found out the guy actually had about fifteen fake accounts that he created, stealing other users’ pictures and information to create the accounts, and was actually communicating back and forth with himself. Just to try to make himself appear cool, I guess?
Rumpus: That’s a really sad display of humanity.
Employee: Yeah. That is the most bizarre encounter that comes to mind. Those two are the big instances I’ve seen that made me say, “What the hell is going on?”
Rumpus: So tell me about the engineers.
Employee: They’re weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, I’d say, 90% in PHP. All the front end—everything you see—is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he’s literally rewriting the entire language. There’s this distinction in coding between a scripted language and a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top. But with a compiled language, the program you write is compiled into an executable file. It doesn’t have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands. It’s much faster that way. So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you’d have with a human being in your entire life. You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he’d get it. And there’s a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.
Rumpus: So what will be the net effect of running the site on Hyper PHP?
Employee: We’re going to reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%, so practically, users will just see this as a faster site. Pages will load in one fifth of the time that they used to.
Rumpus: When’s it coming out?
Employee: When it’s done. Next couple of months, ideally.
Rumpus: So where do these geeks come from?
Employee: I would say at least 70% of Facebook engineers are from Harvard and Stanford.
Rumpus: Wow. I know Zuckerberg went Harvard, what’s the Stanford connection? I mean other than just Palo Alto.
Employee: I don’t think there’s any question that Stanford is the number one CS department in the world.
Rumpus: Stanford engineers invented Silicon Valley.
Employee: They did.
Rumpus: How has the recent move affected the company?
Employee: Facebook just moved offices to Stanford Research Park, which is where the original HP was started. Before it was kind of sprawled out. We had seven or eight offices downtown.
Rumpus: Any changes in atmosphere after the move?
Employee: It was just nice to have everyone in one office. Before, any meetings that happened were inconvenient for most people. I mean, engineering was split up into three offices. It was a pain. Now there’s more unity, more ease of communication. Everything feels more internal. It’s super-friendly. I think the coolest thing about the work environment is the trust. They don’t care what, where, how, when, as long as you get your shit done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit done. Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done. And it goes a long way. Because I know I can get these things done. I know I’m going to have to go back. And I may be there until ten or eleven tonight.
Rumpus: I’m sorry we drank all these beers.
Employee: It’s the trust deal. We’re able to do that. We don’t have to worry. We can put our personal lives first, as long as we get our work done.
***
Rumpus original art by Lucas Adams.
163 responses
I can’t imagine this conversation really took place. This person would be fired for giving up this kind of information. This seems like a hoax.
Haha that was so fake. I give the article a D-. 🙂
Long before publication, I determined to my satisfaction that this interview really took place. I would not have included it if there were even the slightest suspicion of a hoax.
Seems like this person could get into some trouble by leaving too many identifiable clues. Caitlin, and his friend’s situation. For someone so savvy about privacy, (s)he seems very casual about dropping this identifying information.
I’m sure internally it’d be a piece of cake to figure out who this was– but really there doesn’t seem to be anything worth investigating here. It’s got an “secret chat over beers” tone, but it’s nothing that every FB employee probably hasn’t told their friends or family already. The anonymity is mostly for the public’s sake, so they don’t read more into it than is printed. Our reaction would be very different if this person were Director of Advertising versus Lead Janitor.
Very interesting though.
for anyone with a brain you have to know that face book does track everything you do , how else could they let you know when you haven’t talked to someone in a while etc , whos birthday it is on what day and of course people need to entertain themselves at work , who wouldn’t have a peek at someone else’s pictures if they had access to them thats the fun of facebook get over it there is always someone watching what you do , ! stop being all paranoid! just know it exists! and move on ,
Phil, if this is a not made up article and this conversation did take place, your friend will most likely be fired. You let on that a female two-year veteran of Facebook, who just had you to their new campus as a visitor (whose name is probably on the confidentiality agreement that you had to sign) and who is a friend of yours (maybe they’ll cross-reference Facebook pages?) is talking some serious shit on her company. Good job, ace.
While I’m sure FB does save everything. They seem to think Lawrence Lessig and I are besties. (I wish!)
Facebook has my birthday. It has my high-school graduating class. And yet it keeps feeding me large-breasted advertisements targeting the wrong high-school class.
So: still a few bugs in the system.
Leave it to the Rumpus to make even a fake interviewee disgustingly self-important.
Oh yeah, this is going to be a firing. The interviewee will be a lot more cautious at their next job.
After reading all this, I just deleted my Facebook account.
Sounds fake.
Wow. If your goal was to keep your friend anonymous, you certainly gave enough identifying details about her that she can likely be found out. (Her gender, time at the company, and the fact that she was involved in researching the Caitlin and imposter-brother cases.) Though maybe you were clever, and your pal is actualy a guy who’s been there four years. Or maybe your pal is lucky and her/his boss won’t mind the interview. Maybe.
I’m not surprised that Facebook keeps so much info about its users. But also, because there are 250+million of us, I don’t lose sleep wondering if any of my info is being seen by some random employee. I didn’t give them my real birth year (not for vanity, just as a privacy thing), and I do take care to not put anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t want my mom or future employer to see. (Then again, I’m also past my partying/club days, and most of my pals are pretty judicious in what photos get posted. Not everyone can say the same.)
i cannot get the type-ahead thing to work. can anyone replicate this? how?
I wonder if facebook looks at all the stuff you’ve done on it if you were to apply for a job there…?
I could not go back to work until I have had at least 4 pitchers.
Facebook knows your friends more than you do.
This girl is so fired. A two year veteran, involved in “the Caitlin incident”, discovered a fake account from the brother of one of her good friends. Not to mention visitor logs and friends with you…
_I_ could probably figure out who this is.
Sean, none of the things you mentioned require recording every screent that someone clicks on, every profile that someone views. You are clearly not a developer, but don’t let that stop you from talking smack.
It is indicative of your response about privacy, that you are probably only 14, so I shouldn’t be too harsh. Privacy is slowly being eroded, and has been for about 100 years. Facebook is just eroding it faster than anything before.
If this happens at Facebook, what do we think happens at Google?
To all those who just deleted your facebook profile. You might as well close your bank account, all your loans, accounts on other websites, etc. Lead developers and database administrators at every business worldwide have access to all their records. You wonder why 99% of companies say they’ll never ask you for your password? Its because they already have all the information and they don’t need your password.
Food for thought.
‘HyperPHP’? Seriously, ‘rewriting the whole language’?
Compiling isn’t any big deal or surprise, though. It’s funny how this person describes it.
is this real, or is it supposed to be satirical? the statistics in this interview sound fabricated, and there’s no way to verify them
None of this particularly new, nor is the anonymous interviewee likely to be fired. As he said in the interview, photos of the Facebook campus are already all over the internet, and I’ve read a lot of what she said already through various interviews and postings made by FB employees in a PR role. The fact that she’s interviewed anonymously likely has to do more with protocol, and less to do with any real fear or personal identification.
With that in mind, I’m sure details are fudged, such as names she references and language used. It’s obviously been edited, streamlined to bring facts to the fore, etc. Common journalistic licence.
All in all, good article.
None of this is really surprising. However, one piece isn’t accurate. When you type “a” in the search box or scroll down, friends aren’t ordered by popularity, they’re alphabetized. I think they changed this early last year.
we all know that no such thing as “privacy” when we joinned a social network on the internet (except you put in false info about yourself).
with over 250 million members, and when you are not a “celebrity” or “VVIP” i don’t think facebook employee will bother to look up your profile or pictures.
so, let’s the status update moving..
For all the to-do this interview is getting on Twitter and coverage on BoingBoing, I was expecting something more nefarious. I think the only new piece of information I saw in here was about the Hyper-PHP rebuild, which sounds like something the company would want to boast about anyway. Oh, and translating the entire site into Farsi within 36 hours (impressive), but once again, nothing nefarious, just another bragging point.
Sure, if some of the identifying facts contain in the interview have not been altered to protect the interviewee, then it would take this person’s superiors about 10 minutes or less to narrow down who this person is, but so what. I mean really, the biggest thing they did was talk without authorization (yes, that can be a big deal), but all about stuff that’s common knowledge to anyone who has the most cursory knowledge of their business. It might not be common knowledge to Joe Six-Pack, but… what is?
@Ivan: It wouldn’t surprise me, if I’m honest. They could only do it with your permission, though.
You guys are way too paranoid. All of this stuff is entirely possible but there’s 3 million accounts that have all been used at some point or another and that leads to a huge backlog of stuff. Like it says in the interview, a needle in a haystack.
Oh no!
Fabricated or not, the interview true. Is it realistic to think that anything you do online is private? No. But is it realistic to think that you’re important enough for that to matter? No…
And to echo what someone above already said…it’s not just Facebook. If you use Gmail, there are breathing, beating people out there with access to all your stuff. It’s just that, with access to millions of users’ stuff, why would you ever think that yours would be on-demand to an employee of Google or Facebook?
Privacy is an artificial idea anyway. Yay! I’m going to watch some Six Feet Under and have some gummy bears. Don’t tell anyone!
Caroline Kennedy (of all people) wrote a book on privacy: http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780679744344-0 . Anyway, think how much your mailman knows about you.
This is a fake interview.
But we can not neglect the internet security…..
Regards
DJ
I think what some people here crying about this employee being found out don’t seem to be realising is that she could be a he, he could have been there longer or shorter than stated and the stories could have been altered, Caitlyn being a different name etc.
Really greate interview.
It sounds good and i think our data is “save” at facebook, because they have so much.
Blah, nothing you couldn’t guess in this interview. Facebook data stored in “back end database” shocker. This employee is blatantly in the PR dept, and this interview was blatantly approved by FB.
This is really interesting – I’m pretty sure the interview is real but was arranged by a PR agency (with or without the journo’s knowledge) as putting rank and file employees in front of bloggers is a common tactic these days. The idea behind the tactic is that the reader trusts the random employee more than a corporate spokesperson, even when (like here) the employee is almost completely towing the line. But no one on this board seems to believe that the employee exists!
That´s an exciting article.
For the people that worry about their data, and even more for them who don´t because they don´t know, this is important.
So, how is the right on this article?
I would want to translate it into German, because I´m german and I think this is important.
Can anyone tell me?
Why they still have “non-disclosure contracts” at Facebook, according to Zuckerberg is this whole confidentiality and privacy protection thinking not longer up to date!
So they store every keystroke? Big deal. It is the job of the authorities to be paranoid so you dont have to. The real game is also beyond individual needles in haystacks or even individual accounts – its about behaviour patterns. See i2group(dot)com.
It’s OK guys- if Facebook lose all history of your interactions, Google will have a backup 😉
I don’t know if this interview is real or fake, but, in any case, the “trillion photos” is not realistic. A trillion photos stored from 200 million users would mean ~5 thousand photos per user… Definitely, not realistic. A more reasonable value would be in the order of billions.
No one is going to be fired. But someone will be promoted for this absolutely excellent piece of PR.
I have nothing to hide! Take me facebook!!
p.s. I am Caitlin! (it’s the new “I am Spartacus.”)
I’m Caitlin and so’s my wife!
When I was temp at a very large company, I was a file clerk for the HR department. Being a temp is boring, so having access to paper files of all the employees, I looked through the paper files and knew everyone’s salaries, records, SSN numbers, everything. That’s a low level temp with major access to physical paper.
When I later worked at a very large computer company as a Systems Admin, I had access to all the files on the servers for every user. I’d get bored and just look through stuff. Employee reviews, more salary stats, contracts, etc.
I even found a file called “Bottle”, which turned out to be porn. Just to fuck with the high level executive who had the “Bottle” folder, I locked it down so he couldn’t delete it, only a SysAdmin could delete it.
Jump ahead ten years and this is where we’re at. I just assume everything I type into Facebook, email, has a potential to be seen publicly. Does Joe/Jan Public really care about my interactions? I highly doubt it.
Have I sent emails I wish I had never sent? Oh yeah, have you ever drunk dialed?
If I saw a pretty lady walking around naked with her curtains open across the street, would I watch her? Yep.
Corporate America is keeping tabs. Club Cards at grocery stores for discounts….BevMo knows exactly what vodka I buy and has a pretty good idea of my home consumption. Safeway knows I eat an apple a day and has a pretty good idea of my bowel movement activity by how often I purchase toilet paper.
I guess I’m saying, I don’t see the fuss.
Copyright issues, that’s a different story. Read those user agreements and make sure if you’re posting photos or other content that’s important to you, keep the copyright, or publish it in another publication. But, again, why would anyone want a copyright to my user pic? Hell, they can have it. I’m not that interesting.
No, *I* am Caitlin.
If this isn’t a complete fabrication, then this supposed employee is worthless anyway. Consider his response when asked about “eye-tracking:”
“For example, when we want to introduce new features, like when we streamlined the browsing of photo albums, you know, where you can click ‘next’ above the photo, and the page stays the same except you get the next photo? We did tests on that, and actually found out it increased the number of page views by 77%, essentially because we were reducing 77% of the page load, and therefore it was loading faster, and thus generating more clicks. We not only reduced our bandwidth, and how much we have to pay for our Internet, but we made the site faster and increased the clicks-per-minute, which is what we’re truly interested in.”
First, the response never really addresses “eye-tracking,” though most people would know what it is and how it would be applied to the case above.
Second, to jump to the conclusion that this technique “increased the number of page views by 77%, essentially because we were reducing 77% of the page load” is an unfathomable logical fallacy. Correlation does not equal causation, for one, but if you extended this supposed-formula, then every modern site would increase its pageviews several thousand-fold by going text-only.
Finally, a properly-built site for that kind of load shouldn’t be reloading the entire frame of the page with navigation and all simply to change one image on the page. Properly designed, the site could use AJAX to load each picture in the photo gallery eliminating the need for additional loading of the navigation altogether.
If this is a genuine interview, then it’s clear to see why Facebook no longer wanted this person.
actually have experience in IT, including working for a search company, telecommunications, cloud computing, massive scale databases, BI, large scale data analytics and reporting.
regardless what “they” say – you can be identified, you and/or groups of you can be monitored – precisely.
These companies thrive on the fact that 99% of the people do not understand what they do. eg: has anyone heard of cloud data partitioning by unique user identification? Probably not, no one would expect you to.
But this is the kind of “stuff” that allows companies to use your data to identify, track, log your behaviour – and make money.
Why is it such a big deal that companies do this? Does someone really need to answer this fn question..?? really??
Get more folks in the industry to speak up
thanks
I hate facebook and everything about it and wish it had never been invented. I deleted my account over a year ago and still have been getting crap from friends and family for not having one. I miss the days when emails or text messages were the most high-tech form of catching up with old friends. Hell, I would rather (and do!) write letters and send pictures through the post to my friends than log onto facebook to talk to people. Maybe I should have been born several decades earlier than I was. Not sure that says much though, because my parents and even grandma are active facebook users.
Facebook is lame & I hope it crashes and dies one day so people can remember what their lives used to be like before sitting in front of a computer screen for hours either stalking strangers for no reason, or creeping on friends they should get off their ass to go see in person or something.
/rant.
Well, regardless of whether this is a real interview or not, Facebook is still the devil and everybody who uses it is an idiot. I’m not on and never will be on Facebook because I’m not a narcissist stalker who thinks people care about what I’m doing right now, nor do I care what other people are doing. I see zero point in Facebook unless you are extremely lazy and this is what relationships have come down to in the 21st century. Enjoy Facebook, sheep. Remember the people in WALL-E who became so fat and lazy that their bones actually separated from lack of need of joints? I’ll bet they all had Facebook accounts.
The gummint used info re- John Lennon’s marijuana use to shut down his anti-war activism (they threatened to deport him); and there are many similar examples of arguably minor missteps used to stifle dissent.
Also, commercial, governmental, and other authoritarian interests attempt to use insight into our psyches to manipulate us without our awareness. So far, their skill in doing so has remained ahead of most of our skill in deflecting the effects of their efforts.
I presume you who are so unconcerned about the abuse of people’s private information have EITHER never bent a rule, OR you plan never to oppose authority; AND EITHER you are crackerjack ad & propaganda deconstructionists (and judging from the disagreement re- the authenticity of this interview, that can’t be the case for more than 50% of you), OR you don’t mind being brainwashed into believing you can find happiness through products and propaganda — AND you don’t care how any of the foregoing applies with respect to the rest of humanity.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — George Sanatayana
I don’t get it. SO What. Anyone who posts anything on FaceBook (or for that matter, anywhere on the internet) that is so personal that they don’t want anyone else to see it is an idiot. https sites are secure, FaceBook is not. DUH. FB has helped me find old acquaintences and make friends I might have otherwise never met! I have been dating my girlfriend for two years, we met on MySpace. We love each other. I also get into great arguments over politics on FaceBook. Humans are social creatures, this is simply a new and powerful way to interact. And who cares about whether this employee gets fired or not? Clearly, she changed the stats to protect her job; telling juicy stories is all that really matters in journalism.
I’ve noticed that a lot of user comments to an article on a subject like the one above will express indifference or disbelief, or readers will leave that’s-the-way-it-is-now-get-over-it responses. I’m not sure which of these is worse, so I had a think about it.
If you don’t care, you don’t care. Fine. If you don’t believe, I’m not sure what to tell you. What is stated in this interview, though interesting, is on the whole fairly commonsensical and should surprise no one.
Which brings me to those that’s-the-way-it-is-now-get-over-it responses, which I’ve decided are worse. I don’t know about you but when I read them, I get a we-know-we’re-being-mistreated-but-just-go-along-and-don’t-make-waves-because-you’re-okay-right-now tingle at the back of my neck and it makes me feel slightly ill and causes me to attempt to translate the ideas behind these comments into German, for consistency’s sake.
The sinister part about these online products, as with other consumer products in the US of A, is the public is almost entirely unaware of what the trade-offs really are; their government does very little to protect them; in the case of online products, will not enact privacy laws that might help consumers at least make informed decision, if not improve or codify corporate online practices. There has been some interest in this area but as usual not enough.
Doesn’t help that, generally, Americans see companies like Facebook as benevolent; why so many think this way is another story, but good for The Rumpus for publishing this interview and I think it should continue to publish pieces like it in the future.
> I don’t think there’s any question that Stanford is the number one CS department in the world.
*snigger*
@Kirk: LOL, well said. 🙂
You can not delete your facebook account. Ever.
If I may add . . .
Knowledge is power, and a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge.
You want to play poker with guys who have you hooked up to a lie detector but who don’t even show you their faces. The game may be fun in the beginning, but it’s rigged so that if you have anything to lose, you will.
…Poop
Or maybe “Carlyn, and the others” weren’t her friends and the names were different.. and possibly the time (S)he has worked there is different. Seems to me a little odd that the two most weird cases this person has ever encountered somehow happened to be there friend… Sounds like there mixing shit up so there are no identifiable markers… Maybe it was that person and a few others working the case, and I bet this happens allot. So more than likely no one knows who specifically did What fixing on a lost or harassed account.. Just saying, you guys are reading wayyy to far into this. Seems legit to me.
It’s real for sure
Caitlin…
As long as facebook is not telling my wife that I am secretly spying her hot sister’s pictures then Im all ok with it. 🙂
So basically what you’re saying is Caitlin = poop?
I just can’t decide – is this a prank or a straight fake?
I have nothing to hide! Take me facebook!!
p.s. I am Caitlin! (it’s the new “I am Spartacus.â€)..
Nothing new. We all know that fb save everything on every day. And why shouldnt they do that? It cost almost nothing and the only treasure of fb is the data of its users.
This is really not a good way of making me use facebook ever again.
fake as fake itself…
Come on !
There’s truth and lies in this. Every developers, admins, dbas, etc … have their ‘admin’ access to everything, but their’s some rules when you work in this.
It reminds me of a security company I use to work for some years ago, they have all the keys, alarm’s codes and any elements to enter their customer’s house if needed.
But ho ! “eye-tracking” !!! ROFL !!!
you all think that the information stated about the employee are correct , they could have just twist them or make them up….
I thought it was a very insightful and interesting interview. It makes me feel slightly better knowing that Facebook holds it’s employees accountable for their actions. I’m sure many other sites would just sweep it under the rug and give a tap on the hand. User privacy is going to probably always be an issue here though. I mean, when you have over 200 million users, you can’t make everyone happy. I for one, am satisfied.
What I want to know is if they record chat conversations? That was never mentioned in the article.
Sounds like a song title, “Anonymous Facebook Employee”, a ballad by Huey Lewis and the News….
Yes, I’m feelin’ the 80’s are ripe for a comeback!!!
This is Really? Sometimes i think this interview is a fake..
I enjoyed reading all of the comments here but what I really thoroughly enjoyed was wasting company time.
If only the ideal that you can do whatever you want, when, how, etc carried on to real companies as long as you got your shit done. I’d like that freedom very much considering I do get my shit done in an efficient and highly productive manner.
Yet I can’t walk outside the building for five minutes without getting harrassed about being mia.
I feel we are pretty much resolved to losing any control over our data and privacy no matter how many little gems like this we get fed. Instead of being asked what we want exactly we are offered just so much that they still get what they want, whoever they are. It’s a shitty trade off but that’s life nowadays. There are so many big brothers my family has grown rather larger of late…and I am not Caitlin, though I wish I was.
I totally believe this. I know a mutual friend who past away and his brother needed his password to get into his account to thank every one for their condolences. When they contacted fb to retrieve his information fb didn’t question with a death certificate or anything. They were able to verify by pulling up the deceased page and look at all the condolences that were written on his wall to verify. They let him reset his brother’s password.
Full disclosure: I work for ${big_bay_area_company_not_far_from_facebook} and have no competitive vendetta against Facebook. Furthermore, I have kept in close contact with a number of former employees from my company who moved over to Facebook in 2007, some of whom grew disgusted with the company’s ethical practices and left.
This article pretty well corroborates what my friends said about the company back then . What I will say is that their individual accounts of the company paint a far scarier picture than this exposé:
For a long time, there was NO auditing of employee access of account holder data. This led to interesting internal abuse. I had heard of weekly contests held among some of the employees where the goal was to find the must fucked-up, freakish member profile and vote. Granted that this was not officially-sanctioned, it is still abhorrent. This would have never happened at ${big_bay_area_company_not_far_from_facebook}. Access to member data is both restricted and audited (i.e., logged). By means of audit logging, such invalid use of data would have resulted in employee termination within 24 hours for malfeasance.
I was one of the early adopters of Facebook back in early ’04. With each year that went by, I grew increasingly suspicious of it. After hearing my friends’ stories, I promptly terminated my account in ’08. I haven’t looked back.
I am a programmer at a large company and work with sensitive data (names, ssn’s, addresses and more..) I know what company information can be provided to public (such as in this interview) and what should be kept private.
There is no secrets information in this interview. If company finds out who was this person – they should give him (I think its a guy) a bonus!
What described in this article is that all FB information is well-kept, maintained and to the point where they can identify the intruders or fake people. He also saying that only graduates from Elite schools are working there – which is a big + for the company. He states the company even tracks who from employees are accessing which accounts and why.
Don’t forget that a credit card company has more of your information then FB. And while regular call representative may not have access to your account, until you call and provide your mothers maiden name, the support people and Database Administrators do have full access – which may not be tracked.
Well I’m in the who cares camp.
Or more precisely, you pay for what you get. Some people here are crying foul on privacy? Excuse me? Is FB forcing everyone to sit at computers and entering their personal information?
You violate your own privacy.
Seems to me that they probably changed a few other identifying characteristics; “she” might be a “he”, and might have worked there for much longer or shorter. And who says that the name *was* in fact Caitlin? It was probably Ann or something equally innocuous.
This is an awesome interview. Don’t see much like this in paper magazines. I hope you all do more of this.
By _this_ I mean I guess interviews with esoteric experts, long-form, unfiltered and unanalyzed-seeming. I think. Anyway thanks.
Ali Says:
January 11th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Facebook knows your friends more than you do.
NOW THAT is the quote of the century, it is 110% true and couldn’t put it better myself.
Are you that dumb? First of all, everything he said about the person he interviewed has been manipulated… Names, Sexes, Locations, Dates, were all probably changed when this went to print.
“Phil, if this is a not made up article and this conversation did take place, your friend will most likely be fired. You let on that a female two-year veteran of Facebook, who just had you to their new campus as a visitor (whose name is probably on the confidentiality agreement that you had to sign) and who is a friend of yours (maybe they’ll cross-reference Facebook pages?) is talking some serious shit on her company. Good job, ace.”
interesting… at least for me, bcause i don’t know much about internet and computers.
Those calling this fake are obvious trolls. The Internet is full of them.
Great interview, Rumpus.
“I think the coolest thing about the work environment is the trust.”
I don’t think he investigated the ‘Catlin/poop’ case – I think his colleague did. By claiming he did it, he’s misleading his employee who will inevitable point the finger at his colleague instead. He’s deliberately dropping clues which implicate another employee and distract attention from himself.
“anonymous employee! your fired!” ^^
seems like the expression, “golly” would be pretty easy to identify by the folks at facebook.
@anon: ditto :]
Holy moly. I love it when an article drums up more content in the comments section than the article itself. Maybe this is all part of some covert micromarketing experiment by Facebook.
If this guy/gal was a true engineer, s/he would’ve used much different language to describe the PHP section – that whole paragraph does not at all read like it’s from a developer.
Further, the analogies are inaccurate, and the description of interpreted (“scripted”) vs. compiled languages is much too elementary (not elementary in a “let me break it down for you non-techies way”, but elementary in a “I don’t really know what I’m talking about” way). There’s just too much in his/her choice of words that sets off the BS meter.
So: either this is bullsh*t… or the employee is masquerading as a tech to save his ID. Maybe a QA monkey, or IT/ops helpdesk’er, but most def no engineer.
I found this to be an interesting article, if only 10 percent of it is true, it certainly gives facebook power. I actually love facebook, but the Orwellian overtones concern me. At what point is the definition of privacy just a legal term for litigation in the future. As they expand into foreign markets, all sorts of people will be interested in the information in their data base for non corrupt or corrupt usage. Security for those of us who like facebook is the utmost importance. Just tonite I got a request from some whore in Montana to “be my friend” I chatted for two lines stating I was not interested and removed her from my list….How the hell did she find me, I appeal to nothing she has, (Im gay) and really can’t figure out how she found me, now she is on a data base with my name. They need to address these things to make people feel more secure. Personally I love facebook, but the impications are scary. Whether this interview was fabricated or not, it still has a premise of possibility and warning. I will be watching my page much more closely for intrusive industrial psychology and interference. No Im not paranoid, I don’t trust corporate America One bit.
This is nothing. Are you people aware that Twitter broadcasts all our tweets into outer space?
Great reading …
Yes, you can get eye-tracking studies done. In 30 seconds I found this http://www.simpleusability.com/ . It’s not something they do with everyone on FB. FB You hire these kinds of companies to do it with test groups.
If FB is storing such huge amounts of data, it will ultimately cost them at some point too much to keep. Really, any tracking data past a couple of years – does it really make sense to keep it?
IT people in most companies can see anything and everything in any and all emails and all file servers. Don’t forget that.
They can monitor your traffic and figure out what sites you’re browsing in real time. This has been possible since day one of networking before the dang internet ever got popular.
Take comfort in the fact that the larger the amount of data and users, and the more over worked and understaffed the company, the less likely anyone internally will give a fuck about you and your profile.
What you need to worry about is the guy from Istanbul who hacks into your company’s IMAP server and does nothing malicious, just reads emails and watches for credit card numbers. Or the numerous hackers who will at some point get into Facebook and MySpace and Google and get into your shit. These are the people you really need to worry about.
The credit card companies want your business so badly, they’ll tolerate identity theft reimbursements and chargebacks and all the losses caused by data theft that they’ll publicly lie about the break ins, robberies and how bad it all actually is. Like the recent Citibank robbery of several million by some russian hackers – which Citi denies but the truth is probably that the hackers got away with it.
Worry about security of the data – not the company and its policies … most HR departments in big companies have the entire company hostage and walking on egg shells and keeping people politically correct to the point that it’s not the insiders you need to worry about, it’s the outsiders – the hackers and thieves.
Now would be a great time to delete your FB account … “all your base belong to us” …
My creepiest encounter on FB — I was playing some kind of word game back and forth with a friend, privately. The kind where you play one move a day or so (whenever you log in to check your account). I don’t play it any more so I don’t recall what it was. It had a comment/chat box, so we could leave a little message to each other.
I noticed that some of the comments I put in (those that had swear words) were disappearing. I tested it a little and it seemed to me like a person (not a bot) was reading/monitoring and sanitizing our conversation! So I started writing comments in the little box that were directed to them — expressing my concern at being monitored…if I recall, I was probably a little alarmist and using words like fascist.
After I left a couple of comments like that, I actually got a response — apparently some person HAD been reading our conversation. They apologized and stopped doing it.
I didn’t expect, with so many million users to have someone spying on little old me. And hilarious that they wanted to clean up my chat content (I am 40 years old and my friend is in her 60s). If it were a public chat room I would’ve censored my own language, out of respect for those who find some language offensive. But it was a one-to-one chat with someone I know very well.
Wild.
Smells like PR to me. Having worked in the valley for several years it just sounds too… naïve.
Heather it was almost certainly the developer of that app (game), not someone at FB doing it. But as for “why”, I can’t really explain.
Hyper-PHP will be free (GPLvX) or another Open Source License?
If the Facebook people really want to find out who your source is, can’t they just cross-reference your friend list with their employee directory. Better give your friend a head’s up.
Go talk to that guy working on HPHP about basketball – he loves it.
I have a FB account. I set it up in the past with a lot of ignorance on this privacy issue. I no longer use it.
I do not see the reason for FB keeping the deleted account and the information on me as I no longer use it. When I delete an account all my information should be wiped. I bet keeping that information probably breaches privacy laws in countries like France.
Why should FB keep my information. Deleting an account is a red flag that FB has no legitimate reason for keeping my information. What is the real FB agenda?
Hahaha the worse part:
We have four data centers around the world. There’s one in Santa Clara, one in San Francisco, one in New York and one in London. WTF world is that?!?!
Most ironic statement thus far:
“I don’t get it. SO What. Anyone who posts anything on FaceBook (or for that matter, anywhere on the internet) that is so personal that they don’t want anyone else to see it is an idiot. [https sites are secure, FaceBook is not. DUH.]”
Uh… you’re right, you don’t get it.
To all those people concerned about the identifying details revealed in the interview and introduction … they are probably fake.
Surely ‘she’ is not that stupid. (‘She’ may be a ‘he’, ‘brother of a very good friend’ may actually be ‘friend of a cousin’, ‘Caitlin and poop’ might refer to ‘Kathryn and boobs’, etc)
Better than concealing your personal details is to reveal deniable false details.
Cheers
Reading this through it sounds like a pretty normal corporate operation to me. Consider that, even back in the good old days where people filled in private forms on paper and they were stored in secure facilities – they would still have had to be checked by at least one employee of the facility. So someone, somewhere is always going to have read your private stuff. At least, they would have on paper. With the net these days, it’s more likely that your private thoughts will never be read by a human.
The deal about storing deleted information is almost a moot point too. Even if you physically delete a file from your hard drive, it’s still there. That’s how police catch kiddy fiddlers. Deleting rows from a database could potentially lead to more problems anyway as you start increasing fragmentation.
Honestly though, people need to stop worrying about privacy. If you want to keep something private, keep it in your head. That’s how the world has always worked.
If this is legit – OMG. If this is not legit – pretty good fabrication. could have skipped out on the profanities though, unless you were going for effect.
Since the post talks about something that happened in the Summer of 2009, it could be easily said that the employee no longer works for Facebook…or at least it stands to reason. There aren’t any huge corporate secrets divulged. Facebook is “pay to play,” with your information as table stakes. If you don’t want to play, then don’t. Google keeps track of all your searches, so it’s pretty certain that FB would keep track of all your actions. For instance, I just saw an ad on my account claiming that all men, aged XX can get free gas by clicking on the ad…using the fact that I’m a male, aged XX. Plus, I too receive the big-breasted ads that say that someone is searching for me from my high school and they’re female. Hmm. You’d think that the fact that I am engaged would put me in a different category, but I guess not. The amazing thing to me? The number of servers…
The person being interviewed is definately a dude. No girl would give the replies this person did.
How convenient to have a link letting me share this story on Facebook.. on Facebook. 😉
She says that HyperPHP will solve PHP’s main problems, mainly that it is a scripted languages and it being run from top to bottom and that stuff at the bottom cannot reference stuff that was defined before.
This employee is full of crap and has never touched PHP in her life, obviously.
Good article! Being an IT system’s engineer, you just know that you have the ability to access any sort of data you want, and you just need to be ethical about it. Sure, there are auditing practices and tools, but they can a lot of times hinder or slow down getting something implemented, improved, or fixed. You ‘can’ log the stuff, but now you’re hiring a team of people to audit the logs to decide whether the SQL queries were legit work or not (and who will watch the watchers?). When you create a product that you just want to work and are constantly changing it, you’re not really concerned about whether someone is really bored and pathetic enough (someone with access) to read someone else’s messages. Believe me, even a programmer has better things to do. It’s the same deal with any other site you have a login to. I have the ability to read incoming and outgoing e-mail for about 60,000 users, in addition to looking at sensitive company secrets for our 100+ clients. The thing is, I’m too busy doing work and have enough drama in my life to snoop in on someone else’s. That’s just how IT works, especially when you’re dealing with linux/unix type servers.
I doubt anyone will get fired for this, and if they do, Facebook will get a bad wrap for it and will offload another 2k of disgruntled users. It does seem a little PR-ish if anything, but I don’t care. It was a good article. I’m a bit confused about the Hyper-PHP thing though. I’m assuming this guy is creating a new language or is simply converting everything into something like C.
So the bottom line is this; don’t post or message anything you absolutely don’t want anyone in the world to know about. With that said, us IT people could really care less about your personal life. With over 200,000,000 Facebook users, what makes YOU so special anyway? Get over yourself and just have fun.
Also, check your bank account and see how much you’ve given Facebook. No, I don’t have your account number, but I also know that you didn’t pay Facebook for anything. Why? Because it’s free, so stop whining. If someone gave you a free burger, would you complain that it didn’t come with fries and then throw it on the floor? After you’ve done this, would you then proceed to stomp on it and blog about how bad your free burger was? Then would you get a bunch of people to form a group to complain about your free burger?
See, like I said – us IT people could care less about your personal life. We enjoy the finer things in life, like making up metaphors familiarizing websites with free burgers.
LOL @ Stanford being the “best CS department in the world”. To other Stanford grads, maybe. I’d take any number of east coast schools over Stanford, or anywhere else in CA, really. (Pretty much everything about California is highly overrated, including their schools.)
Facebook hires the smartest engineers! So smart, in fact, that they chose to implement their site in PHP! Geniuses, all of them!
Thanks KR, you have just provided the proof that California is universally disliked by people who are their own first cousins and play the banjo.
A guy from Michigan: *couldn’t* care less. If you could care less, then your care-level is above the absolute minimum and there’s room for it to go lower.
It’s kinda like people singing like a fool or picking their nose in their
car! You have to realize that the silly car is practically made of
windows and that people can see in without any problem. If you’re aware
of that and okay that anyone sees you…then I guess you can go ahead and
belt out those lyrics and keep digging for gold! If you’re not aware of
the fact that other people may actually look at you while driving…you
just need to wake up.
awesome, I hate my facebook account
It’s obvious this is a conversation between two guys
“Brad Says:
January 11th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
After reading all this, I just deleted my Facebook account.”
No, you didn’t. After reading all this, it’s apparent you can’t really delete anything on FaceBook.
Every Engineer will know this. How to do else then saving everything? He said it already: Its dynamic. All on the pages is dynamic…and it must be stored in a database to being showed. Its pretty logical and every website which is dynamic is doing it this way. Not just Facebook…
Comment #112 is just right: https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes#comment-15846
@Comment 9: hah, I still get tons of dating service ads when I explicitly keep labeling them as “irrelevant”, and they STILL keep appearing. Definitely a fault in the system.
PHP is read from top to bottom and can’t reference code declared lower? Not true. works fine. PHP is not a one-pass language. The interviewed must be talking about Ruby, which does have a one-pass limitation.
The whole PHP thing is bogus at best, or incredible stupid at worst. PHP executes on serves, not in browsers. It exists for simplicity for rapid changes, not for execution efficiency. The standard, when one needs speed, is to use a compiled language. If one wants to compile PHP, there are many PHP compilers out there, such as the open source PHP compiler called PHC. For someone at Facebook to be writing yet another PHP compiler is a waste of company resources, and is at best an exercise in intellectual masturbation – useless motion whose only purpose is to pleasure the person doing it.
What’s the difference between facebook and the nsa/cia? – Have a guess.
@ Facebook vs. NSA/CIA
NSA/CIA have to SPEND money to find and keep people’s private info.
I tried typing the first letter of the name of the person I communicate most on FB and contrary to what the ‘insider’ claims, the results came up alphabetically. So, yeah, I still think it’s a dodgy interview.
Hey guys. You didn’t get the point: Facebook is a compny from FBI –> Face Book Internet
HUAHUAHUA
Even Richard Stallman (Founder of Linux) don’t trust Facebook. Don’t believe me? Do visit his website.
What a load of BULL crap! Did you know that the internet was invented by FBI Spies? Not many do. But now you do. Now you can think about it all. about your security, about your data, about your information. it all goes through a server. wether its translated in to different language, or into different data styles. So what you type in a text form. before your text is read by the person you have sent it to, its read by the server who you sent it through.
Best thing for you people who are paranoid, is dont go on the internet at all. then you wont get anything you put, type, or what ever you do on the internet, it wont get read, or your data kept. And about facebook? well look up both words of facebook in the dicionary. ” Example to the lame ” What do you do with a book? I leave it at that. think about it people. even by reading, and or making your comments, about what otehr people has written., you are contributing to the world wide data, all for the FBI, and other companies to read, think about how the job centre found those guys dodging work and claimin sick benefits? Oh and here comes! facebook was involved, why you ask? well because the guys who were frauding the benefits, were happily writing in there status that they are goin on holidays, and buying all sorts, not to mention the on the side business they were doing in quiet. what gave them away, was they were telling there friends to meet up for a few pints down at a local pub, Hmmmmm very strange, since they are claiming that they were sick and cant move there legs and were wheel chair bound, You see the angle im goin here is this, Facebook is closely working with all these govenments agencies, and you be suprised how close there are to FBI. and other law and forcements. How else do they know what, and where they catch these criminals? think about it people. YOUR DATA IS NOT SAFE AT ALL< no matter how a website try to decieve you and tell you that your data is safe. Its not, and never will be. Sorry to put this dampner on you. But again you need to think about it. and for all those ppeople who say, well they can look and take your facebook account, as you are not hiding anything, well fair enough, but what if you slip up saying in your status, about someone, or you mentioned someones name without realising that person maybe after by the govenment? how would you feel you dobbed in your very best friend, or someone close to you? then you will become an enemy, all because you mentioned his or her name in your status? so you say you dont hide anything, and yet you have mentioned the were abouts of a person that the govenment or police is after. Again think about it., IF you dont want people. or websites, to know you details. dont go on the internet. Simple.
Well If every one switch from IE to Firefox. Think we would have same problem there or even bigger, because open sorce is open for the bad boys to. Is the solution to have many Browsers? Or is it possible to make total secure browser (I think no, if you like to keep functionality)? Is the solution to have cloud computer (your client connect to Internet and downloads…). Or something else..
Clearly, the ‘friend’ of the article writer worked with Facebook PR more in the past year than s/he ever has with PHP.
“He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he’s literally rewriting the entire language.” – Basically, he’s writing a PHP compiler. That’s not rewriting the whole language.
“[In a compiled language, the computer] doesn’t have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands.” – This is one of the worst explanations I have heard for a compiled language. Compiled languages execute faster because they’re already in binary; interpreted languages need to be converted each time they’re run. Where the program’s code is read from in the file (at the start) is completely irrelevant!
“Then he’d get it. And there’s a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.” – Clearly, you’re not one of those people
That’s all I’ll say.
……..FBI –> Face Book Internet hahaha…
Smells like PR to me. Having worked in the valley for several years it just sounds too… naïve.
“lol” (You violate your own privicy) Nothing in my facebook profile is correct except my name every thing else is made up. Hell my cat has a facebook account. Just be smart about what you put in there. No where are you told you that you absolutely have to put correct information in. You are told to do so but you don’t have to, to set up an account. I have proved that. If you don’t like it don’t use it. I both hate facebook and love it at the same time (kind of like a spouse)”LOL”
Agree with spunky, recent market research showed that 80% of profile information is incorrect, misleading or simply fake.
I would’t worry too much about Facebook privacy, it is Google which makes me worried. Those guys know way more private information about you than Facebook.
Simple solution to social media privacy. Don’t do or say anything online you don’t want to share with the entire social media world. Don’t click on, or interact with social network profiles you wouldn’t want the whole world to know you clicked or interacted with.
Be yourself and stop worrying about public acceptance. The world only pretends to live in the social box it claims to live in.
I LOATHE FACEBOOk aka FAKEBOOK because it’s so fake and so HIGHSCHOOL: I founded my website to MOCK facebook but mine is better cuz I added webchat without downloads—facebook is owned by a high school drop out without ethics [TIP: Zuckenberg should go enroll himself in ETHICS 101] oh and yeah I graduated with a 3.83 GPA MAGNA CUM LAUDE in PHILOSOPHY I know ethics.
ngineers! So smart, in fact, that they chose to implement their site in PHP! Geniuses, all of them Thanks..
Propably the funniest post and comment on the whole Web! Oh Humanity 😉
Don’t put any personal information on FB..just put some fake piece of information cause it might trigger some Bad peeps interest..
Ha, thats such a fake convo. Very funny, reading the comments made me laugh too. Maybe this fool has defected to google now? as part of there social network.
Maybe she wants to lose her job?
You’re either sociable or you’re not,and if ur not,u won’t use facebook.
All it is is $$$$$$,this is their main concern,I’m sure they only care about your privacy because they have to by law.
I deleted my account a few months ago,too many bad things happening in past for me,leaks,stolen identities,phishing,viruses etc,etc.Perfect breeding ground for hackers,I don’t think anyone can deny that.
I did get in contact with my mum after 8 years not knowing where she was,so i have to say it does have it’s advantages after that slagging off
I was really suprised when i found out facebook suggest feature. they already did know who are people i know even better than i am. So i like it actually.
My country is concern about internet privacy – not facebook.
who would of thought they were spying on you
I truly appreciate the paranoid sentiment. In theory you’re probably right. If some maniac got their hands on that information we could be in a lot of trouble.
However, in reality, how many people have you met that were a bit shady about what they did for a living? Where it just didn’t sound true? Look how many of you instantly pounced on the above! And surely if FB were *that* good at the psych stuff it would have worked that out a hell of a lot better as I think a lot of people will (attempt to) delete their FBs because of it. How many of the comments above came from FB people? How much are they learning from it?
To get back to the point – if there was someone paying that much attention to each individual, that would mean a LOT of jobs. A lot of jobs where people couldn’t talk about what they do. We’re all way better at communicating than that. Our spoken language doesn’t ring true, our body language betrays us, whether or not we want it to. This isn’t happening.
But what’s frightening is, it could.
FB really scares me with this privacy stuff coming out recently
The interview may be real or fake but the details covered about FB seems real.
About “eye-tracking”, actually, I think, they should use the word “mouse-tracking”.
And I think, this is not only about FB, almost all details mentioned about FB here also applies to mostly all social networking sites and other sites which stores information about their users. So, quitting FB is not enough to stop compromising about your privacy, but if u really care about privacy,u should also stop using other social networking sites.
That’s true, I’m sure the privacy and security is far worse at other social networks, it’s just that everyone’s on fb.
Wow, while I really enjoyed connecting with my friends on facebook, I was never aware just how much they store. Am actually a bit concerned, what is facebook going to do with the information in 5,10 or 20 years? From a business standpoint, this kind of information is a treasure trove and I now understand how facebook will soon be able to compete with google, creating their own search engine (saw that they filed for one)
wow, facebooks just a security threat to all of us and those who use it. just read the zukerberg ims exposed here and to know that you’re just submitting your info to someone who can abuse it however he wants is sucks.
I’m out of facebook. i’m onto opensource Diaspora. its out.
Crazy and yet not surprising. Facebook and Google are watching way more than we know and we really have to be careful. I see so many people with their phone numbers and other sensitive info on their facebook pages. Like, really, you trust all 1,300 of your “friends”?
@Tyrone Bogus, huh? It was real after all. It’s called Hiphop PHP but it was still HPHP. It was made by Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao.
I am alarmed by everything which appears to alter the image of facebook. I have seven hundred thirty-one friends.
HPHP is real … here’s a reference from feb 2010 on the oracle blog, which references savings etc and facebook using/developing it.cpuhttp://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2010/02/facebooks_hphp_initial_comment.html
I feel so alone. You can’t possibly understand.
In Russia you browse sites. In Democratic America the sites browse you!
Am actually a bit concerned, what is facebook going to do with the information in 5,10 or 20 years? From a business standpoint, this kind of information is a treasure trove and.
I’m sure internally it’d be a piece of cake to figure out who this was– but really there doesn’t seem to be anything worth investigating here. Crazy and yet not surprising. Facebook and Google are watching way more than we know and we really have to be careful. I see so many people with their phone numbers and other sensitive info on their facebook pages. Like, really, you trust all 1,300 of your “friends�
There’s been a lot of talk recently about privacy settings on Facebook, but are people utilizing them to the fullest? Do users understand the complexities involved? When the privacy controls shifted in the not-so-distant past, photos, for instance, were left open by default to friends and networks, meaning that anyone in, say, all of San Francisco could see your pictures. How is this relevant to identity theft? Well, assuming you accepted that dashing fellow with the winsome grin you maybe remembered as a friend-of-a-cousin-twice-removed-and-from-out-of-state and allowed him to see everything detailed above, he could, in theory, have quite the jumping off point for identity fraud.
Even this conversation took place or not, facebook still records all what we do in their site.
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