
Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years–and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix It All - NicoJuicy
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell
======
secfirstmd
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."

~~~
fwdpropaganda
This is well known.

~~~
8_hours_ago
How is this done? Does the Facebook mobile app record all location data? Or
does it record all nearby bluetooth devices?

~~~
fwdpropaganda
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.

------
aestetix
"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.

~~~
danso
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._

~~~
tachang
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.

~~~
danso
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?

------
e15ctr0n
> _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?

~~~
chunky1994
It looks like someone flagged the story unfortunately. It dropped like a rock
from the front page. It really is an excellently written piece

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

~~~
dredmorbius
Email hn@ycombinator.com

------
danso
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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/technology/facebook-trending-
list-skewed-by-individual-judgment-not-institutional-bias.html)

------
SpikeDad
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.

~~~
jacquesm
> 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.

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

The question still remains...

