Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

OK so an insider can just lie and access whatever they want. Heck, they can even tell the truth! Just find a bug that's exhibited in a particular profile and use that as an excuse to look at the profile.

> How else would you suggest to do privacy checks like these?

Whatever Google does. I don't know the details. But, for starters, my understanding is that their interns generally can't do what you just described, so fixing that would be one obvious step forward.

It's certainly not true at financial institutions. By financial institutions I mean Fortune 100 financial institutions, as well as smaller financial institutions.

If by "pretty strict internal controls" you mean they can, like Prince Potemkin, point to such things existing in some chimeric form, then yes, I suppose you are right. But in any real sense, no, there are no effective controls in the real world.

About 25 years ago I assumed it was early days for a lot of these things and they would sooner or later be closed up, but they haven't been. Things are wide open - as the recent Facebook/Analytics things have shown. In a very small and indirect way at that.

The first major book on this broad subject was Donn Parker's "Crime by Computer" published in 1976. The book opens by saying that a company's biggest enemies in terms of computer crime is its own employees. This is still true 40+ years later - the biggest enemy of the people who own companies are the people who do the work at them.

-Marc Andreessen;

-Erskine Bowles ("President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina" and "White House Chief of Staff from 1996 to 1998");

-Ken Chenault ("Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of American Express Company");

-Susan Desmond-Hellmann ("Chief Executive Officer of The Gates Foundation" and former "Chancellor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) from 2009 to 2014");

-Reed Hastings ("Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board of directors of Netflix");

-Jan Koum ("co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp"); and

-Peter Thiel [1].

Might not be a bad idea to pen a letter to their Board [2] with your state attorney general [3] and perhaps a U.S. Senator [4] copied.

[1] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx

[2] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contac...

[3] http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php

[4] https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_...

Interesting how quickly the narrative changes.

"In addition, third parties may attempt to fraudulently induce employees or users to disclose information in order to gain access to our data or our users' data."

"Although we have developed systems and processes that are designed to protect our data and user data and to prevent data loss and other security breaches, we cannot assure you that such measures will provide absolute security."

"In addition, some of our developers or other partners, such as those that help us measure the effectiveness of ads, may receive or store information provided by us or by our users through mobile or web applications integrated with Facebook. We provide limited information to such third parties based on the scope of services provided to us. However, if these third parties or developers fail to adopt or adhere to adequate data security practices, or in the event of a breach of their networks, our data or our users' data may be improperly accessed, used, or disclosed."

Source: MD&A, 2015 Facebook annual report