Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
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Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#2Well that's because the question is meaningless - What does it mean "all your personal data"? What does "where" mean? Physically? Which tables? Which data is relevant? Friends? Friends of friends? Ad data? Behavioural data? ANY inferences, models built on user datasets that might include that user?
They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know.
Context: I worked at Facebook
Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#3Well that's because the question is meaningless - What does it mean "all your personal data"? What does "where" mean? Physically? Which tables? Which data is relevant? Friends? Friends of friends? Ad data? Behavioural data? ANY inferences, models built on user datasets that might include that user? They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know. Context: I worked at Facebook
All your personal data in the article references data generated by inference from personal data, it was pretty clear in some paragraphs and quotes.
The where part is also alluded to as to mean "systems" from what I gathered.
Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
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Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#5[deleted]
Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#6> The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. “Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored,” he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” He quickly added, “For what it’s worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well.”
The cynic in me wants to say that not documenting certain decisions is a common method of hiding immoral decisions.
Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#7Well that's because the question is meaningless - What does it mean "all your personal data"? What does "where" mean? Physically? Which tables? Which data is relevant? Friends? Friends of friends? Ad data? Behavioural data? ANY inferences, models built on user datasets that might include that user? They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know. Context: I worked at Facebook
Companies which deal with personal data do so in the context of regulatory frameworks (CCPA, GDPR etc) which define specifically what the definition is and what’s covered. They also have to record what they collect and process and for what purpose.
If you’re Facebook you have to know this in order to process that data. You can’t pretend not to understand the question.
Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#8Besides the legal issues, isn’t there also a technical problem? Facebook is potentially storing the same information multiple times, or missing opportunities, because a engineer did know that some data was available.
I guess storage is cheap enough, but even for Facebook, being able to save say 10% on storage must mean something.
Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#9Well that's because the question is meaningless - What does it mean "all your personal data"? What does "where" mean? Physically? Which tables? Which data is relevant? Friends? Friends of friends? Ad data? Behavioural data? ANY inferences, models built on user datasets that might include that user? They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know. Context: I worked at Facebook
Ya the way he responds saying a full team would be needed to uncover this sounds like he was treating "where" holistically. Every bit of information in every server, application, etc. Feels like a trained response.
Re: Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data
#10Kind of serves as a good example of "single central conspiracy" versus "many actors given common cause to act in a certain way" ways of thought. It's easy to imagine Zuckerberg going to work every day and laughing maniacally as he personally shepherds your stolen conversation with friends yesterday about your experiences with laundry detergents into The Facebook Info Vault and then personally uses that information to send you ads about Tide laundry detergent, but what Facebook really is by sheer necessity is a whole bunch of agents operating with their own goals. The end result is a massive machine that turns privacy violations into money, but there isn't necessarily a single place where the bad thing happens. In fact you could conceivably be taken on a tour of the system and agree that every individual component is acceptable, or that the vast bulk of them are OK and there's only a single-digit number out of thousands that are problematic.
Nobody could possibly manage Facebook as a centralized single entity, but it's hard to imagine it any other way from the outside.