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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

#41

Post by UncleMeat »

markstos wrote: post #36
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…

You can hire one or more data privacy people whose whole job it is to track this. They get an inventory of all the systems and talk to the managers of every system, find the answers and document them. Meta is choosing not to know or pretending not to know. They have the resources to know where your data goes.

I think you are underestimating the complexity of this task by about three orders of magnitude. This is the way to do it, but you can't do it for a company of this scale with a handful of people.

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

#42

Post by snowwrestler »

There is a difference between what is known and what is knowable.

For example if you asked me now if I know where all the receipts are for my tax-deductible donations, I would say no, I don’t know. Why? There is no reason for me to know right now.

But if the IRS told me I was being audited and must produce those records or go to jail, I would find them. And I have confidence that I could, because I know that in general, those are the sorts of records I keep (somewhere).

Most Facebook employees do not need to know “where personal data is” to operate their business, so they don’t know that. But at the same time, Facebook could not operate if the data was “nowhere” (destroyed), or if it was randomly distributed with no queryable structure.

So the question is not really what they know now, it is: what incentive do they have to go find out.

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

#43

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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…

Maybe, but one can find out. You can follow the chain of calls of any software, and they have access to everything, as well as the whole history.

It's like when in an interview Buffets says it's very hard to know where all the money is in the financial system.

Sure, it's a complex system, but it's more of a matter of incentive.

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

#44

Post by dannyw »

pavlov wrote: post #27

> The systemic fogginess of Facebook’s data storage made answering even the most basic question futile. At another point, the special master asked how one could find out which systems actually contain user data that was created through machine inference. “I don’t know,” answered Zarashaw. “It’s a rather difficult conundrum.” This is not a basic question because of how ML works. Can we say a system contains my data if…

> In that case, can I sue anyone using Stable Diffusion for stealing my data because the billions of images in its training set included something I created?

No, because of the landmark Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case which found that ML training can be considered fair use in some circumstances.

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

#45

Post by lolc »

RichardCNormos wrote: post #12
personjerry wrote: post #2

Well 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

[flagged]

The way I understood it, the questions determined that Facebook didn't even try to gather the evidence they were required to. Saying "we didn't want to do that because it is hard" may fly when they know how hard it is. But they don't even know that! Institutionally incapable because nobody pays for it, they argued.

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

#46

Post by nathanaldensr »

jtbayly wrote: post #35
handity wrote: post #17

After reading some more of the transcript, I think the article does such a bad job of describing what was being asked for that it makes the court seem incompetent and Facebook actually rather reasonable. My original comment is below: Government contracted construction workers: We Have No Idea Where Your Tax Money Goes When tasked with answering the simple question "Which specific bricks did my tax money buy this year…

That’s an absurd analogy that doesn’t fit at all. FB uses the data it can’t find or tell you anything about to successfully sell ad space to third parties targeted back at you. Let’s make it concrete. We know FB keeps track of which webpages you visit. We also know they use that data as a way to help target ads. That data isn’t in the data export they give you, as far as I can tell from a brief search. Is there data…

Exactly. If Facebook can target ads at specific users to begin with, then how can they possibly claim they don't know where the data is or how to find it? Then how do they know the users are being targeted "correctly" or at all? It's a ridiculous argument that falls apart under any scrutiny. Their entire business model relies on them knowing how to target specific users using huge graphs of information.

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

#47

Post by handity »

jtbayly wrote: post #35
handity wrote: post #17

After reading some more of the transcript, I think the article does such a bad job of describing what was being asked for that it makes the court seem incompetent and Facebook actually rather reasonable. My original comment is below: Government contracted construction workers: We Have No Idea Where Your Tax Money Goes When tasked with answering the simple question "Which specific bricks did my tax money buy this year…

That’s an absurd analogy that doesn’t fit at all. FB uses the data it can’t find or tell you anything about to successfully sell ad space to third parties targeted back at you. Let’s make it concrete. We know FB keeps track of which webpages you visit. We also know they use that data as a way to help target ads. That data isn’t in the data export they give you, as far as I can tell from a brief search. Is there data…

Agreed, Facebook definitely has the ability to provide timestamped interaction events as part of "Download my Data". Maybe legislation will force them to provide that information at some point, but that won't really have any effect on user privacy.

The hearing seems to want to get more to the heart of the issue, but is inept to do so. The stored data isn't the concern, it's the predictive capability of models built on it. The decision of a predictive model isn't any more traceable to a single piece of data than a brick in a road is traceable to a given taxpayer, which is what I was trying to get at with the analogy.

After reading some of the transcript, the special masters seem very on the ball, and it's more the spin of the article I take issue with.

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

#49

Post by kornhole »

Because I suspected this mess, I took a less expedient path to deleting my account. I found a picture of somebody with my same name and made it my picture. I unfriended everybody I actually knew and only kept randos. I liked a bunch of random stuff. I did not actually delete my account until a year later to let the chaotic data propagate into all the subsystems, backups, and partner networks.

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

#50

Post by AlwaysRock »

personjerry wrote: post #2

Well 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

>Well that's because the question is meaningless No.

>What does it mean "all your personal data"? It means all your personal data.

>What does "where" mean? Where facebook stores it.

This is only a complicated question if you want to start saying, "Well this isnt really their personal data, we just use it for x..." If its data related to my account or me as a user it's my personal data.

Maybe its difficult to track all that down but certainly that is a challenge worth tackling in a world where GDPR exists.

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