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Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

theintercept.com

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Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#81

Post by kixiQu »

encoderer wrote: post #56
kixiQu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a large long-living tech company. Where legal compliance and security are concerned, "it is just layering and organic growth" is not something you get to say. If we were speculating about such a thing on a coffee break, maybe we'd get the kind of answer given here, but if a single reference doesn't exist for something that is necessary for compliance , people get paged until it does. (There may be other th…

Yes and it’s a good thing that most industries do not carry this governance burden.

They do have a burden. Following the law is table stakes. Now, are the laws relevant to a business the same across industries and around the globe? No. Does enforcement have its shit together equally everywhere? Obviously not. But making every team in a company classify the XYZ their component stores is absolutely doable and frankly an easy lift when the alternative is not doing business that involves XYZ.

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#82

Post by PuppyTailWags »

encoderer wrote: post #56
kixiQu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a large long-living tech company. Where legal compliance and security are concerned, "it is just layering and organic growth" is not something you get to say. If we were speculating about such a thing on a coffee break, maybe we'd get the kind of answer given here, but if a single reference doesn't exist for something that is necessary for compliance , people get paged until it does. (There may be other th…

Yes and it’s a good thing that most industries do not carry this governance burden.

I think specifically any industry working in personal data collection of minors should absolutely have this governance burden. If Meta knows enough about their users to know Instagram is giving teenage girls mental illnesses, Meta engineers should absolutely be hoisted out of their beds if they don't have precise, well-defined, secure data stores.

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#83

Post by citizenpaul »

This is misdirection plain and simple. In the best most convincing way. Get tunnel vision (sorry) nerds to make an honest display of their ignorance of the bigger picture at Meta. Aww shucks we don't know where that data comes from....

Of course senior engineers don't know where the data comes from exactly. Does your mechanic know where each tire comes from or care? Does your fav restaurant chef know each field that a produce came from? The suppliers know that info.

I know beyond any doubt that there are most definitively some people that know at least roughly where most data about most subjects are at Meta. I'm sure the data is a vastly beyond what a human can process. However some people there know where to go looking. The truth is in the Piles of money they generate by selling that data.

Awww gee wizz your honor. We have no idea how we do it. People just keep throwing piles of money at us so we keep taking it. I don't know why they do it. We definitely don't have mountains of highly specialized data on our users that we tell them we can get exactly what they want then provide that info to them. Somehow though when the court asks without piles of money we just can't make that magic happen...........

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#84

Post by slenk »

ctur wrote: post #11

In many ways you can think of large, long-living tech companies not unlike old cities like, say, London or Paris. The buildings and roads you see are built on top of older buildings and ruins. The streets are weirdly shaped and intersect at odd angles because they were made hundreds of years before and adapted over time as needs evolved. There are catacombs underneath sidewalks and no one genuinely understands it all…

Not tech giants that care about compliance...it's not undoable.

They are just poor stewards.

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#85

Post by citiguy »

UncleMeat wrote: post #71
RHSeeger wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But pretending they can only afford "a handful of people" to work on the problem is a little silly, too. They don't have the answers because they choose not to devote the resources to get the answers; not because they are unable to devote the resources.

I agree with that. Companies like Facebook should have a large org responsible for this problem. My point is that the problem is way more complex than some might think.

Agreed - when I worked in the financial industry there was something called data lifecycle management. Since keeping data around indefinitely meant you could be held liable at any time for anything that happened in the distant past, companies are motivated to track data and delete anything that's no longer necessary for business as soon as possible.

No such law exists for Facebook, so they don't care. Someone needs to pass a law with a big fine attached and then things will change.

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#86

Post by kixiQu »

nicolas_t wrote: post #61
kixiQu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a large long-living tech company. Where legal compliance and security are concerned, "it is just layering and organic growth" is not something you get to say. If we were speculating about such a thing on a coffee break, maybe we'd get the kind of answer given here, but if a single reference doesn't exist for something that is necessary for compliance , people get paged until it does. (There may be other th…

Counterpoint, in my career, I've seen a lot of Security Audits that seem on paper to be very thorough and detailed but when you dig deeper, you can see that it only touched the surface and the auditor missed a lot of things.

I mean, sure, security is complicated, lots of judgment calls, but within this mindset, if a team/org/company said "we have no idea where we're using log4j" it was then their job to have someone working around the clock until they figured that out and fixed it. Figuring out how to meet new requirements that weren't around when systems were begun is, IMO, fully just part of the job. For FB engineers to be throwing up their hands in front of a legal system like oh nooooo how could we possibly track things seems like a stalling technique and makes all of tech look bad.

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#87

Post by citiguy »

Jenk wrote: post #66
ctur wrote: post #11

In many ways you can think of large, long-living tech companies not unlike old cities like, say, London or Paris. The buildings and roads you see are built on top of older buildings and ruins. The streets are weirdly shaped and intersect at odd angles because they were made hundreds of years before and adapted over time as needs evolved. There are catacombs underneath sidewalks and no one genuinely understands it all…

I agree with the point you are making, but I disagree with the conclusion. A company like Meta that has been building and advancing the field of ML, AI, and even falling foul of the ethics/morality of large scale public manipulation and political campaigning has already demonstrated they have the wherewithal to find where their data exists. Period.

The issue is more that they don't care. They don't really need to track it so they don't.

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#88

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

UncleMeat wrote: post #71
RHSeeger wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But pretending they can only afford "a handful of people" to work on the problem is a little silly, too. They don't have the answers because they choose not to devote the resources to get the answers; not because they are unable to devote the resources.

I agree with that. Companies like Facebook should have a large org responsible for this problem. My point is that the problem is way more complex than some might think.

it's also way simpler than some might think, in that it's simply a matter of Facebook choosing not to devote enough resources to it, and thus choosing not to know

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#89

Post by seti0Cha »

mschuster91 wrote: post #65
encoderer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and it’s a good thing that most industries do not carry this governance burden.

If more industries did carry this governance burden, we'd see a lot less cases of companies getting hacked left and right. For way too many companies, "IT" is just another cost center that doesn't bring in any profits and so is barely kept at life support levels. And when something inevitably happens, it's rarely the C-level that gets to go to the unemployment office, it's more one poor soul who has complained for ye…

Hah, I might have agreed before I worked on a credit card processing system. There were plenty of rules alright, but it's possible to abide by all the rules without actually making a secure system. Some of the rules made it harder to create a secure system because they did not reflect the state of the art, or they made adding additional security too burdensome to implement. In the end, you can't force competence through rules.

Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

#90

Post by hkgjjgjfjfjfjf »

ctur wrote: post #11

In many ways you can think of large, long-living tech companies not unlike old cities like, say, London or Paris. The buildings and roads you see are built on top of older buildings and ruins. The streets are weirdly shaped and intersect at odd angles because they were made hundreds of years before and adapted over time as needs evolved. There are catacombs underneath sidewalks and no one genuinely understands it all…

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