Technology
Facebook ‘sacked 52 rogue employees who SPIED on users including reading private messages’
FACEBOOK allegedly fired over 50 employees who took advantage of their data access to spy on users and even read private messages.
In a new book, reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang claim that the spying and firing events happened around 2014 and 2015.
AFP or licensors52 employees were fired for spying, according to a new book[/caption]
The Telegraph was said to receive an advance copy of the damning book.
It’s called “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination”.
A report from the publication has already revealed some of the disturbing revelations.
One disturbing story involves a Facebook engineer who was holidaying with a woman in Europe before they had a fight and the woman left.
The engineer wanted to know where she had gone and is said to have used his access to Facebook’s location data to track her to the hotel she fled to.
Another Facebook engineer was said to use his data access to secretly spy on a woman who stopped responding to his messages after an unsuccessful date.
“We’ve always had zero tolerance for abuse”
The book claims he had access to “years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on.”
He was also said to access her location data because she had the Facebook app on her phone.
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, was said to make CEO Mark Zuckerberg aware of these problems in September 2015.
Stamos reportedly thought the employees were abusing their data access for spying purposes every month.
Around 16,000 employees were said to have data access before the issues started to be addressed.
A Facebook spokesperson told Insider: “We’ve always had zero tolerance for abuse and have fired every single employee ever found to be improperly accessing data.
“Since 2015, we’ve continued to strengthen our employee training, abuse detection, and prevention protocols. We’re also continuing to reduce the need for engineers to access some types of data as they work to build and support our services.”
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