I think the way this problem is framed succumbs to an outdated world view, an image of the samurai computer hackers that put themselves in the service of the corporate lords - but are ultimately responsible for their actions against society and can choose to rebel. They are rare and prized and thus their collaboration is valued by the lords.<p>This is a romantic vision that the companies themselves like to perpetuate, but it's no longer true for a decade or more. It's irrelevant what the Facebook employees think, just like it's irrelevant what the employees of McDonalds think about the health of their customers. They are not unique, precious snowflakes of rare skill, they are replaceable cogs in a machine that exists for a single purpose, profit. Massive IT education programs now underway everywhere in the world will ensure that the corporations will have vast masses of foot soldiers so they can concentrate on what matters: creating competitive advantage and market dominance using the strong network effects technology affords.<p>Silicon Valley has bred an ultra-aggressive type of capitalism that will crush and automate the old competitors away but will no longer redistribute the wealth to the workers, as capitalism has done for the last few hundred years, because it no longer needs them. In this economic war, developers are rich mercenaries, not noble freedom fighters. The likes of Facebook and Uber are simply the expression of that social reality, a glimpse into the world of tomorrow.
I left Facebook a few months back so I don’t have anything holding me from sharing my honest take. Also I was involved in platform development a lot. Don’t envy the folks who stayed btw - now it’s gonna be much harder.<p>In short: Facebook does care about user privacy a lot. Some of the worst pains we had in platform development at Messenger were related to convincing privacy team to let us open more info to developer. And we usually fail. There was and is a strong sense of internal paranoia around leaking any user data, even if anonimized.<p>Whenever there’s a chance of a data leakage of any sort, everything halts and the whole team is in on it. I personally spent weeks of my life in such meetings, redesigning whole parts of the product to avoid even simplier things like anon user tracking by developers with no explicit consent etc.<p>So when I hear people saying that Fb intentionally does something bad or doesn’t care - those people really don’t have clue.<p>Current situation is a byproduct of two things: 1) legacy decisions (that were reverted in 2015) from when the company was younger and more open and didn’t have those protocols and 2) just the very sensitive nature of this data. This is a social network. What would you expect it to give developers from it’s API? If not your info and parts of your graph. Even those days are over now due to (imo) unjustified paranoia.<p>Ads targeting is another example of that. The fact that you see targeted ads _does_not_ mean advertiser knows _anything_ about you individually. It’s fully anonimized for them!<p>And no, there’s no evil intent to make the UI more confusing to get more of your data. It’s the opposite at that point, Jeez, folks, take off your tin hats. Many things to question Fb about (most notably product innovation) but here they are doing their best.
Imagine that software development / engineering was a profession along the lines of law or medicine - no one could "practise software" without belonging.<p>Now imagine we are drawing up the ethics code for that profession - is what facebook did something that could reasonably be banned? Is there direct harm involved?<p>In my (very personal) view Facebook is just an example of an externality - this loss of control over data is a form of pollution, and the costs are rarely direct harm to individuals, even though society as a whole seems to be being harmed.<p>So rather long windedly, i don't think this is something to beat up on individual Facebook employees - this is something for society level regulation - look to the GDPR and its successors<p>Medical ethics jumping off point: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics</a>
As an ex-fb employee I don't think fb did anything wrong and fb is just a scapegoat now.<p>Media tries to blame brexit and trump on fb instead of realising that a large portion of the population actually want trump, brexit, no immigration, muslim bans etc. Hey, but it is easier to think that the people were tricked into voting like that.
Facebook used to have a little book that they gave out to employees that was almost like a manifesto for what Facebook was, and should strive to be.<p>The book claims strongly that Facebook is a communications company, who want to help (not force) people be more social, and that advertising is purely a side effect intended to enable them to achieve that mission. It was quite cliche, but overall I got the impression that it was honest, I really do think that Facebook the company, and by extension, many of their employees do see themselves like that.<p>I personally find that to be a little naive, but then I am more sensitive to privacy issues than the average person.
I went out with a girl who works at Facebook (she does software development) and asked her this very question.<p>Basically her response was that the whole incident really isn’t even Facebook’s fault but rather the third party developers. Even though Facebook could have done a better job of protecting data, it’s a waste of time to do so as these companies will always find a way to violate the TOS. It’s a bit like fighting software piracy or ad-blocking, hackers are always getting a step ahead. No company is perfect, despite everything Facebook still does a lot of good in the world, and as a company it’s going to keep doing more of it. There’s a lot of people who hate Facebook for personal or business reasons, but in the end there’s no fundamental reason why Facebook is a bad company that shouldn’t exist, it’s only going to get better anyway.
> What do Facebook employees think about their company?<p>You mean "their employer"? Or maybe most have some small % of stock, but to me my tiny-% stock holdings do not make those companies "my companies".
I don't work at Facebook but I don't know if there are any major companies (tech or non-tech) that are significantly better about this? Nearly all Fortune 500 with any significant digital operations are tracking everything they can, especially all media companies. Marketers want all the data they can get to better target people and better measure ROI - so either you're using the data you gather to better sell stuff or you're gathering data to sell it to people who can use it to better sell stuff. Big technology companies seem way better about this (from the perspective of the user) - non-tech companies have much worse practices when it comes to safe-guarding data, are generally not as conscientious about privacy implications and are much more prone to using shady third-party vendors who are not accountable to users and more likely to abuse data. This, of course, includes nearly all ad-funded publishers, where all this criticism of Facebook (and Google and Amazon and so on) abounds. The journalists that are writing about this and tsk-tsk'ing at tech are literally paid by their employers maximizing yield by selling user data.<p>This whole big data thing along with all these related jobs (big data engineer, machine learning engineer, data scientist, etc) - what do people this was all about? Why do we have all this data now that we didn't before - it's because everyone is tracking stuff. So where should we all work if we don't want to be part of this? If you're not doing this directly, you're probably paid by someone who is.
This was my first question at job interview to Facebook. Luckily i got an indian developer and i knew about how aggressive facebook in his home country (does everybody remembers free basics?) and i asked about what he thinks. Answer was simple - this is a form of a competition. I think "competition" can easily justify doing shady things - any of your competitors eventually will do the same and because of this there are no reason to not to implement something like phone book scraping.
So far no Facebook employee has answered this thread (unless they did so between the lines). Considering that Facebook has 25k employees, this must mean they have some very harsh policy on keeping quiet. Either that, or a strong culture that brainwashes them to actually believe they are working towards the naive mission of connecting the world. Or all of the above.
I'm interested in the answers. I'm having upcoming interviews with Facebook, and I wonder if the recent events should be addressed in the "culture fit" interview.<p>My personal opinion is that the problem is not so much with Facebook but with the legislation. Corporations like Facebook are there to make profit within the rules defined by society. I hope there will be stronger laws to protect our privacy and data, and generally more awareness on the issue.
Facebook, along with the military industrial complex is among the places I wouldn't work for any amount of money. Privacy is a human right and Facebook is by far the worst human rights violator and enabler in this respect. Their behaviour is clearly evil, exploitative of human nature and at least for some people using facebook decreases their overall well-being and mental health. People like this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94s0yYECeR8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94s0yYECeR8</a> are clearly intelligent, articulate and competent, yet they are working on a product that is explicitly designed to be addictive and create an echo chamber, as he nicely explains in the talk (if you are curious how click-bait is formalised go to ~34min).
Facebook employees and tech workers in general have a much wider spectrum of opinions that what echo chambers like HN allow. I personally know a lot of Facebook, Apple and Microsoft employees who voted Trump. Palantir employees who are very proud about their jobs and believe that they're making a positive impact on the world. Uber employees who believe that they're engaged in a good fight against regulation and bureaucracy. What's common for all of them, though, is that they generally keep these opinions to themselves and know better than venting them on HN, Techcrunch and social media.
I think the more salient question is "why do people post everything on facebook (and other services)". No sane person can be surprised that this is what happens with your data that you freely give away.
And what I have been hearing nobody actually is surprised. Nor do they care in the end.
Selling adverts is just an extremely lucrative business, get over it. It is what pays for your entertainment (sports etc), information (magazines, internet sites etc) and just about everything.
I fail to get an answer about, "How a founder of a company would fail to think that what would happen to this humongous data which his company is collecting if landed in wrong hands?" Maybe he is noble soul leading his company now and tomorrow he would be shown door and someone creepy comes to lead.<p>I think Fb would be known in history as a major data provider to AI bullshit acts.