Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years–and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix It All | Hacker News Reader

Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years–and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix It All

wired.com

134 pointsNicoJuicy31 comments

Hmmm "One current employee asked that a WIRED reporter turn off his phone so the company would have a harder time tracking whether it had been near the phones of anyone from Facebook."

This is well known.

How is this done? Does the Facebook mobile app record all location data? Or does it record all nearby bluetooth devices?

I don't know how the details of this is done. However, you should assume that every piece of that that the Facebook app has access to, it will relay back to HQ. It will be stored and correlated with other datapoints that they have of you. They will know who you encounter as you go about your day.

I'm super surprised that they haven't made a dating app out of this.

"Then she told him that she had their messages on Gchat, which Fearnow had assumed weren’t accessible to Facebook."

I would like to know more about this.

Came here to ask just this. Even if the journalist/contractor were being as sloppy as possible with netsec, HTTPS would protect traffic between browser and Google's servers. But I'm guessing a place like Facebook would have proxy servers that could be inspecting the traffic if it were done at work? But if the employee took screenshots and waited until they were home to send them, he'd be OK, right? The article says he did this from his personal laptop:

> So when Zuckerberg’s admonition circulated, a young contract employee named Benjamin Fearnow decided it might be newsworthy. He took a screenshot on his personal laptop and sent the image to a friend named Michael Nuñez, who worked at the tech-news site Gizmodo. Nuñez promptly published a brief story about Zuckerberg’s memo.

You're thinking too much into it. They might just record the screen every few seconds and save it to their servers. There's software that does this easily.

The story isn't completely specific on the chain of events, i.e. the sending of the screenshot on his personal laptop may have been done in addition to using GChat at work. But if he indeed was using his personal laptop at work (as many contractors do, though I can't speak for what it's like at Facebook), how is screen-recording software simpler than a proxy server? Aren't proxy servers used by corporate IT to screen incoming/outgoing traffic for possible malware?

Possibly G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Domains).

https://gsuite.google.com

But it has a very bad smell about it. Rather like a brown shirt.

> nothing less than our democracy is at stake

@dang, this is a brilliant piece of journalism. Any way to give it more traction on the HN home page?

It looks like someone flagged the story unfortunately. It dropped like a rock from the front page. It really is an excellently written piece

Is there a way to bring a flagged story to the attention of Hacker News people to unflag it?

Email hn@ycombinator.com

Lots of FB employees on HN. I take it they realize the importance of HN for recruitment purposes, if you can choose between Google and Facebook which you would choose might depend on what you read here. Not that that should even be a close decision.

Who flagged it? Someone from Facebook Trending Group?

It's really unfortunate this didn't have its day in the sun... It's an excellent piece.

Relevant story from 2016: the NYT profiled Fearnow, the contractor who was fired for apparently leaking some screenshots to Gizmodo (but not for the story about FB's bias in curation):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/technology/facebook-trend...

You can't fix something that is specifically designed to get the maximum information from people. However if by fix they mean make it even sneakier about how it gathers personal information then I guess fixed it is.

> You can't fix something that is specifically designed to get the maximum information from people.

You can simply not participate. That's the quickest fix. FB would be out of business tomorrow morning if people realized what a thoroughly bad company this is.

A while ago, I questioned what was first. A decline in users or their algorithm changes.

The question still remains...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com