Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#271

Post by gruturo » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #220

robrenaud wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you are the Egyptian government. You want to squash a social media fueled rebellion, lead by some anonymous person. How hard is it to get one of your bright and loyal minds hired by Facebook? How much data could such a person exfiltrate before getting fired? The 'We will log your access and fire you' line of defense prevents nothing from someone who only has a job for the purpose of moving data out.

They don’t fire you, they arrest you. And then they find out who you work for.

Doesn't matter. At the first hint of trouble you escaped back to your country, protected by the government which had sent you there in the first place, and now the rebels have been murdered thanks to the data you got out.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#272

Post by yorby » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 12:37 AM UTC

craigyk wrote: post #222

mynameishere wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember the first Snowden, who revealed to a shocked world that the NSA was involved in signals intelligence. I suspect that the next Snowden will reveal to a shocked world that 3rd party databases have a tendency to leak into other 3rd party databases.

What amazed me the most from the first Snowden leak was that the NSA was vastly more effective and competent in their efforts than I had expected.

I think that most people think that...

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#273

Post by evincarofautumn » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 3:24 AM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #237

evincarofautumn wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another ex-FB here. When I was there I think it was possible for engineers to access pretty much anything programmatically, although the vast majority never have any reason to go near the systems that would allow them to do so. During onboarding we were basically told “If you look at any data that’s not yours, assume you will be fired”. Everything is logged, so if you might have looked at anything you shouldn’t h…

Thank you for the response. Question: if you (assumed average Facebook engineer for this discussion) observe a bug (normal severity, not something obviously critical and not something conversely trivial) with a particular profile that you cannot otherwise reproduce, and it is determined that addressing it would involve looking at the user's private data, then I assume that would be a valid business reason to do so. N…

I’m afraid I don’t know the answer. I’m confident that such a thing would be quickly recognised as suspicious, so that sounds pretty far-fetched. Most of the time, it’s someone with moderation powers interacting with anything potentially sensitive; a regular engineer is going to be using test accounts, their own account, or asking someone else to look at the issue for them.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#274

Post by dTal » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

legostormtroopr wrote: post #144

KMag wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If advertising were about "helping consumers make informed purchasing decisions" there would never be an attractive model, a wild animal, singing, dancing or any other trope in an ad ever again. They would be a list of superior features of, and only of, the product read in clear, plain terms.

>They would be a list of superior features of, and only of, the product read in clear, plain terms.

And also the inferior features. And those of its competitors.

It's amazingly deluded to even consider that advertising is about informing consumers. It's clearly about disinforming them - clouding their judgement in order to make them buy something they otherwise wouldn't have.