exfbthrowaway

This.

Phish Zuck successfully and you have the keys to the castle.

Abuse scandals erode user trust in the product which is bad because growth over everything seems to be the name of the game. Worse for publicly traded companies as it could impact dollars. Not so much anymore as the news cycles are so short that the impact on the stock only lasts a couple days before bots buy up the dip.

“Perception is reality” was an internal slogan at the time. So if users (at the time) believed it was evil maybe they leave or maybe a possible new users chooses not to sign up.

The other thing too is employees abusing such a tool with other employees. When you use super you assume the user id of the user of your choice. That’s pretty dangerous and there are way better ways of helping a user fix an account issue than signing in as them. If employees can’t trust each other not to snoop then how can users trust the company not to snoop? It had to be addressed internally at the time of the intern that was creeping on someone and that’s when things started getting locked down and more auditing applied. But I think it boils down to PR. If you run a company online trust is everything. I’m sure this crowd understands that nothing online is secure but Facebook was built for the masses and they need to have that blind trust that they’re personal lives are private.

It was called ‘super’ and it was most famously abused by an intern that blabbed to the press about using it. They then added more restrictions and auditing to ‘super’ which was supposed to be mostly for investigations and user operations teams to help users with their own account issues. Also at that time Zuck’s own account was always super so...