“The Big Shift”: Internal Facebook Memo Tells Employees to Do Better on Privacy | Hacker News Reader

“The Big Shift”: Internal Facebook Memo Tells Employees to Do Better on Privacy

bigtechnology.substack.com

54 pointsfreediver55 comments

It is near impossible for Facebook to successfully brand themselves as pro-privacy at this point. When their privacy breaches have been in the mainstream news for years now, the true Facebook business model is just too deeply embedded into the general populace.

Between that and their revenue driver (ads) being seemingly mainly bot traffic based on many of the posts I’ve seen here, it wouldn’t be a wild stretch to say one single black swan event could bring Facebook crashing in the market.

Too much negative sentiment and hot air, not enough true value.

It’s basically impossible without a radical change to their business model, so this is just PR psyops.

Unfortunately investors would greatly prefer a slow death of the company, while committing constant invasions of privacy on the entire world, than the great risk of a self induced reform.

Especially when they can get half the benefits for free by leaking fake memos and ineffective privacy control knobs.

OK, so this is coming from the head of Facebook Reality Labs, i.e. Oculus. Which is incredibly ironic, because Oculus very recently required FB accounts to use the device, which was met with a huge privacy-focused backlash, including from Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus.

So either they are planning to reverse that completely anti-privacy decision, or the author is totally full of shit. Can't have it both ways.

> or the author is totally full of shit

Bosworth's job is to come up with new flavors of Kool-Aid no matter what position he's officially in.

The flavors of kool aid is an excellent metaphor that I appreciated. I even chuckled.

Not sure why you are being down voted, so I commented/posted.

> including from Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus.

"I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" could be the theme of 2021.

My cynical view on this is that Facebook has realized they can better protect their market dominance by raising the walls on their garden and locking down your data as much as possible, and calling that privacy. I expect them to fight data portability initiatives tooth and nail in the name of said "privacy."

"Just the same stairs but now with only one giant step and <insert bigtech> is the one with giant legs"

a quote from a recent post where Google has been testing a replacement for third-party cookies[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903049

I hope at some point a congressperson asks pointed questions about this.

"Why would you send this? Is your company so out of control that you need to send memos like this to get people to 'do better' on privacy? Why are these decisions not being made by the executive team? Does your company care so little about privacy that such concerns are irrelevant to executives? Or is this some poorly-conceived ploy to place the blame on employees?"

"Starting in January we are changing the way we approach product development in FRL"

The key phrase here is "in FRL". Even if they follow through, Reality Labs is one small corner of Facebook.

"The Big Bullshift." Internal Facebook Memo Concocted by Executives and Released to Public via Employees to Dupe People Into Thinking the Company Gives a Shit About Them.

There is no such thing as a modern advertising company that cares about privacy. The idea is laughable.

Does anyone else hear the echoes of Bill Gates "Trustworthy Computing" memo[1] in this? Granted, it wasn't written by Zuck which would have given it more "oomph" as they say, but still the idea that "Crap, this externally applied criticism of our product now has become too onerous to continue ignoring."

It would be a useful legacy if Facebook managed to impact the industry's privacy practices the way Microsoft impacted the industry's security practices, but I am not holding my breath.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/10-years-since-the-bill-gates-...

> Does anyone else hear the echoes of Bill Gates "Trustworthy Computing" memo[1] in this? Granted, it wasn't written by Zuck which would have given it more "oomph" as they say, but still the idea that "Crap, this externally applied criticism of our product now has become to onerous to continue ignoring."

Not at all.

Nothing about Windows as a money-making product was antithetical to improving security; if anything "making secure computing more readily available to the masses" was in line with "making computers more readily available to the masses" which is something that, for all the many faults of their OSes and business, Microsoft has been pretty successful at.

Facebook is surveillance capitalism. That's the business model. No privacy violations, no Facebook as a multi-billion dollar company.

> “We should become the undisputed leaders in providing privacy-aware software.”

Are they leaving the user information and Ads business? ...

Will Facebook make login optional on Oculus then? What would be better for privacy than not requiring an account?

See? It is hard to believe this internal memo is not just a press release aimed to make people trust them more.

> prioritize privacy as they built their products, even to the detriment of the user’s experience.

It's not a "Shift" so much as a wiggle. They are willing to sacrifice the users experience... what about profits? Are they willing to prioritize privacy over profits?

Crickets.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Oh my god. Why are they always so terrible at this?! Can employees decide the direction and usage of a product? Absolutely not. This is a silly PR stunt by the Facebook management

This is being framed as "prioritizing privacy means we'll make more money in today's environment" which sounds exactly liked how Facebook operates. They don't care about anything except whatever makes them the most money. Today that's (some) privacy apparently. Tomorrow it may not be and they'll already have all your historical data to again start mining/selling/exploiting.

It makes clear in the memo, this is FRL (Oculus), not Facebook as a whole.

A memo tells you nothing and staff will forget it in 6 months time. The key metrics by which they measure staff performance is what would be interesting to see what the real culture is.

Good chance to show they are serious by doing a Big Shift on requiring active Facebook account data for me to play Oculus ping pong against my socially distanced family members.

Why would "employees" need to be told this?

Are we to believe random employees just happen to create these non pirvacy products and the VP(s) at Facebook have nothing to do with it?

It is definitely everyone involved, and having this memo out there means engineers can point towards it when working on a feature that could reduce privacy and try and shift direction slightly.

Does that really do anything?

If your boss or your VP tells you to do something ... point to a memo from some other VP guy?

If that's a solution it sounds like the problem is the managment, not the employees. Asking them to fight it out seems like bad advice / not likely to work.

If this is truly a shift in ideology at the leadership level, it's long overdue, but a welcome change; Facebook has depended on privacy-breaching practices for far too long. There will have to be some serious innovation and effort from their end in order to come up with a different business model and undo the damage that they've done thus far.

This could just be a big sham that the leadership is trying to make a big deal about, but I'm hopeful that they've finally realized that the path they're going down isn't sustainable.

Hilarious. This is not something that employees and engineers have any control over, and framing it like this is passing the buck. Furthermore, user privacy is a fundamental top down engineering decision, not something that any individual can "do better on."

It was intentionally "leaked"; the whole thing is a PR move. Facebook's entire business is predicated upon having intimate knowledge of its users and is as such irreconcilable with the concept of privacy.

Why is this downvoted? Zuck decried leaks for years when "leak it to the press" became the only way for rank-and-file employees to affect change on contentious topics, particularly in the wake of Cambridge Analytica. Anything sent to employees these days is 100% expected to be repeated in the press and would be written with that in mind.

> Why is this downvoted?

HN is predominantly ad-tech or ad-tech related people. It's uncomfortable for them.

Hi, I wrote the story. It was not leaked by PR. Did they anticipate it might go out? Perhaps. But consider: Boz wrote it a month ago. If they wanted this out in public, they did a poor job getting it out. This was an internal memo meant for an internal audience to address an internal problem.

Who leaked it to you, then?

> This was an internal memo meant for an internal audience to address an internal problem.

Do you actually think this can address "the problem" or is it performance?

I don't reveal sources. This is another step trying to put Facebook on a path where it's compliant with the FTC settlement.

Guaranteed there was a collective facepalm from all engineers working at facebook when they announced those "privacy changes" to WhatsApp.

Who makes these decisions? Surely it's from people higher to the top than the bottom and not at all the kind of people that would implement such a feature.

Actions speak louder than words and it would have been more meaningful to set some actual policy and protections for people bringing such privacy-violating product decisions to task rather then send the corporate equivalent of a "like and share" post.

I've never met an engineer that was anti-privacy or anti-security... Those traits are exclusively donned by product people trying to push a feature out on time or hit a kpi at the expense of bigger picture thinking.

It was programmers working totally on their own ruined Volkswagen with their pesky cheating algo for the emissions test.

So perhaps programmers working totally on their own can make privacy work for Facebook.

Rogue Google employees did a good job breaking up Google's search monopoly, so there's precedent for this kind of roll-up-your-sleeves success.

> breaking up Google's search monopoly

Google has 90% market share still. I'd thus still call that monopoly unbroken.

You may have missed the invisible <sarcasm> tag on the post above.

Yeah now that you say it I see it too.

Hee hee.

I wish I could put "sarcasm" label in a tooltip or something. It would still annoy people to have to mouse over to reveal the tip (I still win) but my intent would at least be explicit (everyone else wins).

This is like a workplace responding to overwork-related crises (rage quitting, health problems, suicides, etc) by telling people that they need to do some wellness courses.

And then telling them to do more work.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Yeah they do that too lol https://en.pingwest.com/a/3649

"Mr. Yin claimed that he watched as his director typed the report of their one-on-one meeting into his computer and pressed the send button. Afterwards, he told his director in a small talk that he was busy with many personal affairs and felt stressed. Unexpectedly, in the email he later received, a company HR emphasized to him that the company offers psychological help and told the contact information to him, which he suspected was the result of his director snitching him out and made him feel betrayed."

Actually, engineers in big companies have more control than it seems. After all, privacy is not only about intent, but also execution, and care needs to be taken at every level.

Privacy requires engagement from all levels, and I'm this case Facebook seems to be doing the trigger thing after f*** things up quite a bit in the past.

It's not the employees at Facebook who are undermining privacy, but the founder.

Some of us have known this for years. Mark, after all, is the guy who got rich promoting "privacy is dead" and then used that money to buy all the mansions around his in order to protect his privacy.

Blatant hypocrisy.

This could be a smart move. Facebook could position themselves as the go-to platform for privacy aware users. They might capture users fleeing Google, Microsoft and Apple because of privacy.

I'm assuming that "The Big Shift" is actually sincere and that Facebook's history won't be a show stopper.

EDIT: my assumptions are not realistic, so this is probably an impossible outcome. My point was to evaluate if the described move would be beneficial or not. I believe it would.

In what parallel universe would users be fleeing Apple to Facebook for privacy?

I thought my assumptions would make it very clear that this is not a realistic scenario. I'm just evaluating the idea proposed in the article, not its practicality.

It is not a "literally impossible" future, but given what the past has been, this is definitely an improbable incredulous future.

Not sure if I should downvote you or flag you, as what you've written seems to come from some bizzaro parallel universe, but even then I can't grok a universe where someone could flee Microsoft for Facebook.

"Yeah I was gonna finish this important Excel spreadsheet, but instead all I can do is like my not-really-friend's cat videos because I value my privacy."

I was thinking about Microsoft 365 when I mentioned Microsoft, since its an offering similar to that of Google regarding businesses.

And I thought that my assumptions would make it clear that this is not a realistic scenario. Do you disagree that it would be a smart move for Facebook, regardless of the company's history and context?

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