Facebook's Engineers Spied on Women

I agree that the easiest solution is to not collect the data, but I've worked at places that dealt with sensetive data and those limited who could see that data and when. Having procedures whereby anyone accessing sensetive data for oncall debugging work needs to inform at least one other person helps (and people not running production apps should not have access at all).

Besides that it feels like facebook never tried to create a culture within its company that respected customers privacy, so that will lead to people with already shaky moral compasses having a easier way to justify (for themselves) this sort of violation.

Your suggestion that the only solution is to not collect the data makes a lot of services impossible, including all banking, mapping, social media, and so on. Some services need that data to provide services that we want to be possible so lets make sure those are run in ethical ways.

As an engineer I very often have access to private data. The only thing protecting it was that most engineers understand privacy and the implication of modern data collection that is slowly undermined by companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and co and the education the newer generation tend to enjoy.

I worked on medical devices and with sensitive medical data. In this case even pictures of naked people for skin diagnostics. This data cannot be leaked so enhanced security mechanisms were in place. Wouldn't have hindered an engineer really wanting to leak the data and I think there is no way to prevent them from doing so while analyzing data.

So yes, it is actually the case. Ironically, user data access might be most restrictive in companies like Facebook, especially because their business model is somewhat opposed to restricting access to private information and they know they need to make up for it. They also have employees that aren't really trimmed on the importance of privacy, which is showing in my opinion.

A lot of administrators usually have access to all data in small and medium sized companies. And everywhere else there is at least someone who has.

The only exception are end-to-end encrypted blobs for storage applications, but you cannot be sure of that since governments are currently working to get rid of that and the provider could easily lie to you and verification is almost impossible.

In at least some parts of tech, it's common to view Facebook as a "mass surveillance and data collection system." But even after Cambridge Analytica and all the ensuing scandals, I don't think that this view is common among the general public. More commonly, I meet people who think of Facebook as a well-intentioned but sometimes careless product development company.

The shocking part of this article, and many similar articles, is how deeply misuse of user data and cavalier privacy practices are baked into Facebook.

> The same thing happened with big government agencies if you see the Snowden leaks.

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