Facebook's response seems predictable if the intern had just thought about it a bit. I'm not arguing that FB did the right thing, only that they took a predictable action.
But really, if you work for a company, even if just as an intern, you really should be looking out for their interests. If you aren't, then why would they keep you?
Which it obviously is, but by hiring that personn anyway, and have him work on privacy and ethic inside fb they could have shown some good will.
He didn't 'break' anything.
FB could have turned this around and scored a marketing coup: "look we're hiring the hacker who exposed a security flaw, he'll be patching up the hole he found this summer - because at FB we're committed to user privacy and saving baby harp seals!"
But then again, is this really a big surprise? Just another data point in the growing contradiction between what SV is and what SV wants to be.
Almost everyone knows that Facebook the company is hostile to user privacy.
But most people hope that individual Facebook employees have limited strictly audited access to user data.
Any reason to think this is at all the case?
I recall Google getting into trouble over this in the past [1]. I can definitely see data scientists and other employees at FB taking a peek... if anything just finding out who looked at your profile/photos/etc would be pretty tempting.
At this point, FB is just too valuable as a source of intel. I just assume that the US Govt (and others) has direct and easy access. Use at your own risk.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teens...
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-i-attacked-facebook-with-...
> Way back in 2005, a kid named Chris Putnam wrote a computer virus that rapidly spread across Facebook. [...] Pretty quickly, Facebook's COO, Dustin Moscovitz, was able to figure out Putnam was behind the attack. But instead of having Putnam arrested, Facebook hired him.
> "I will be forever grateful that the company was so sympathetic toward people like myself. It's one of the things that really sets Facebook apart with its passion for scrappy, hacker-type engineers."
If anything I'd think the appropriate response would be sitting him down and saying "look we appreciate you are an enterprising risk-taker but we have certain expectations here at mega-corp" Once he was a sufficiently brow-beaten corporate drone then they could have pile monotonous work in him/her ad infinitum. Win Win in my mind.