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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

#101

Post by cloakandswagger »

gus_massa wrote: post #76
suyash wrote: post #8

Zuckerberg should resign at this moment. Facebook needs new leadership if it wants to change the way it has been operating.

Nah. In a week all of this will be forgotten (do you still remember the helicopter in the river, and the bridge that collapsed?). You and me and a few more people will remember, but we all already know that everything that is posted privately on Facebook will be leaked sooner or later. I even expect to see a few angry post from people that decided to delete their account now, and when they tried to undelete the accou…

I thought the same a week ago. Nearly bought some FB calls even. But this controversy has surprised me with its staying power.

The real sizzle comes not from the emotional outrage but the calls for government inquiry and potential regulation, which would do structural damage to all of Silicon Valley. This has been a stunningly bipartisan effort, the left supporting it ostensibly because they like regulating big businesses, and the right supporting it because they (perhaps correctly) see Silicon Valley megacorps as adversaries.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#102

Post by kerng »

kyrra wrote: post #91
kerng wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red team is an overloaded term: "Analyze software and services from a privacy perspective, ensuring they are in line with Google's stated privacy policies, practices, and the expectations of our users." Doesn't sound like adversary simulation to me.

https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/security-e... The job even lists insider threat as part of their responsibility.

Yeah, still not the same as actually performing breaches themselves to see how long it takes to compromise, and if they get detected and how long it takes to remediate and evict the adversary. I should have been a bit clearer with what I meant initially.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#103

Post by pdkl95 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #64
sp527 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> evil

Hollywood et al popularize the misconception that evil is fantastic and done with intent. Most of the time evil is banal[1]. The larger problems happen when the unremarkable, small deviances from acceptable behavior becomes normalized[2][3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...

[2] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#104

Post by harryh »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #39
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really short list of companies, though! There are a lot of companies that each independently hold a ghastly amount of information about random people that have virtually no meaningful controls over this stuff. "No meaningful controls" is the norm. I'd also say it's the norm among most Fortune 500 non-tech companies.

Yep. Equifax, Experian and Transunion come to mind.

These are great counterpoints to the view I expressed and does make me reconsider my assumptions somewhat. Thanks!

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#105

Post by tim333 »

tuna-piano wrote: post #62

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 at…

Personally: I don't care what facebook does with my data - there's nothing very exciting and I have ad blockers so don't even see the ads. It doesn't effect me.

However the Analytica stuff is about conning the masses into voting for Trump and Brexit and that effects me big time and pisses me off somewhat. In face worse that conning - more initing the mob to hatred through lies and bullshit. See for example the Hillary is Satan ad paid for by the russians and targeted with facebook to the kind of people who vote on the basis of that kind of stuff https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/11/02/us/politics/02dc-...

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#106

Post by harryh »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
harryh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think so, but most companies have pretty strict internal controls for this sort of thing. Access is also carefully logged so a leaker is pretty much guaranteed to get caught at which point they'd immediately lose their job and likely face criminal prosecution. With so much to lose and so little to gain internal leaks of this sort are extremely rare.

> With so much to lose and so little to gain internal leaks of this sort are extremely rare I recently downloaded my Facebook archive [1]. If it were legal, I would certainly pay thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars for certain peoples' archives. I can think of several practical contexts in which an unethical actor would find it profitable to pay a Facebook employee a million dollars for someone's Facebook a…

I would certainly pay thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars for certain peoples' archives

Really? For what purpose?

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#107

Post by machinehermit »

tuna-piano wrote: post #62

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 at…

It is this weeks viral thing to be outraged about.

I am buying some FB calls in the morning because no one will care about this "movement" in a month.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#108

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#109

Post by kerng »

debatem1 wrote: post #94
kerng wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google has a gaggle of security teams, almost all of which occasionally red team and some of which exclusively do. I'm not sure who told you otherwise but they were certainly mistaken. Source: I TL'd a security team there several years ago.

Thanks for pointing this out. I heard it from a security manager at Google at a conference in 2016. Good to hear that they do breach simulations now, besides regular pen testing and stuff.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#110

Post by oliyoung »

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.

Uber comes to mind

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