The Fake Steve Facebook Employee Interview

There is an interview with a (probably semi-fake) Facebook employee on The Rumpus - but like the Fake Steve Jobs pages, its probably closer to the truth than any one real employee interview. (If I was a betting man I'd say it's culled from a recent ex employee or two). The points it makes are just what you'd expect as it confirms what a decently technically savvy person can make out from the outside. Among the "darn, I wish I didn't know that" points are:

They're paranoid

A good friend and two-year veteran of Facebook invited me to check out the new space. When I arrived, a security guard handed me a non-disclosure contract to fill out, a requirement to enter the building.

I recall the first time I visited Google and got the same sh*t - it was for an evening seminar where I was talking, so it was my IP! I duly signed "Donald Duck" on my form (as did nearly everyone else in the party)


We know who your friends are, and who you stalk

Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?

Employee: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with.

.....

Rumpus: So in what other ways do you track behavior, that isn’t necessarily obvious to users?

Employee: We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth.

The Information is all there on the backend CMS, whether you deleted it or not

Rumpus: Would you suppose that Facebook employees might read people’s messages?

Employee: See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.

Rumpus: So the master password [allowing access to user data] is basically irrelevant.

Employee: Yeah.

Employees can't help gawking at other people's data (hey, its a perk right?)

Rumpus: Have you ever done it outside of professional reasons?

Employee: I will say, when I first started working there, yes. I used it to view other people’s profiles which I didn’t have permission to visit. I never manipulated their data in any way; however, I did abuse the profile viewing permission at several initial points when I started at Facebook.

This is nothing that you probably didn't already know, but just didn't want to admit to yourself. Amusingly, it would seem, when the latest "privacy" (Facebookspeak for non-privacy) push started, even CEO Mark Zuckerberg was caught napping and for a few hours all his photos were available. It was soon shut off of course .

Watch what they do, not what they say!

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, our advice is to be very careful about what you put on Facebook. You have to assume that someone who is not necessarily your friend will be able to get access to your stuff on there.

Update - TechCrunch has come out swinging against privacy, in this article. They repeat teh "Privacy is dead mantra", and the argument here is essentially is that because we gave in to Google looking at emails on GMail, Facebook is thus also OK:

But the rest of us seem to be ok with Gmail. And our phone. That’s because the benefits of those products far outweigh the privacy costs. And people are going to be just fine with Facebook, too. Even if they did do a switcharoo on privacy settings a month ago that is still reverberating through the tech press.

It does seem that the pro-privacy noise has raised several notches over the holiday period. As we pointed out earlier, there is a lot of money riding on this, so one can expect the supporters of the New New Things to come back hard as well.