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Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

nytimes.com

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Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#61

Post by throwawaysry999 »

esman1 wrote: post #60
throwawaysry999 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i interned at fb a few years ago. any engineer, intern or not, can access production data. day one you set up an instance of fb on your dev server that you can mess around with, and its connected straight to the prod db. you're able to view anything you want, but they're very adamant that they monitor what you look at.

Yes, but you have to explicitly request data every time you access anything. IDK what it was like when you interned, but that's what it's like today.

was not the case when i was there, and it wasn't all that long ago

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#62

Post by tuna-piano »

Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me.

Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook.

The data that Cambridge Analytica attained (from Facebook's API) doesn't seem surprising at all. Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago".

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#63

Post by ajross »

harryh wrote: post #26
mehrdadn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was true at Google. Yes, because Google is not your average company. It takes security extremely seriously... in fact it's about as awful of an example as you can give for a blanket statement you made about "most companies".

OK you're right that I overstated when I said "most companies." What I meant to say was most companies of the size and sophistication of Facebook that have a significant amount of private user information. Sorry for not being clear.

> What I meant to say was most companies of the size and sophistication of Facebook that have a significant amount of private user information.

Which is to say... Google and Amazon?

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#64

Post by Karrot_Kream »

sp527 wrote: post #41
madez wrote: post #10

Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.

No they’re not. They’re in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation. I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully p…

Agreed. I've never been at FB, but been at a similarly big "darling" software company (don't want to go into specifics for identification reasons) and it largely is about creating an internal "us-vs-them" mentality and a culture that lionizes the good deeds over the bad.

Don't think of the employees as evil, they are probably legitimately not aware of the entirety of what's going on. Like soldiers in a war, they only know how their battles are going, not the war.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#65

Post by JumpCrisscross »

sp527 wrote: post #41
madez wrote: post #10

Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.

No they’re not. They’re in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation. I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully p…

> I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures

Wall Street, too, after the crisis. “Of course we bet against our counterparties! They’re counterparties, not clients. If they didn’t read the prospectus they’re morons who deserved to lose their money. We're just the political whipping boy du jour."

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#66

Post by KMag »

debacle wrote: post #50
tbrock wrote: post #40

I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company? You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop. Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression ba…

I respect Google and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company? You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Are people working there really so nieve(sic) as to believe that this is surprising?

Former Googler here. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Googlers understand they work for an advertising company with a gigantic and generally well-run software "engineering" department. I don't mean that in any derogatory sense. Well-regulated advertising is important in helping consumers make informed purchasing decisions.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#67

Post by SirLJ »

justincormack wrote: post #49
SirLJ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a shareholder I do, this kid works for me and it is time to take full responsibility and go home...

Zuck has full control of the company by design, those shares you bought are participation options with no control.

He should donate his shares and resign... this is how he can help humanity...

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#68

Post by SirLJ »

makoz wrote: post #53
SirLJ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a shareholder I do, this kid works for me and it is time to take full responsibility and go home...

Seeing as he's the majority shareholder, you seem to be out of luck.

“Full responsibility”...

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#70

Post by kerng »

mehrdadn wrote: post #19
harryh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was true at Google. It's certainly true at financial institutions. I dunno about Amazon. I'm not sure what other comparisons would be relevant here. EDIT/NOTE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675493

> It was true at Google. Yes, because Google is not your average company. It takes security extremely seriously... in fact it's about as awful of an example as you can give for a blanket statement you made about "most companies".

I'm not sure if Google even has an internal red team that performs breaches, last time I talked with someone there at a conference they didn't (that was 2016). So I am not sure Google has metrics on how easy it is to gain access by an adversary.
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