Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years–and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix It All

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell

by NicoJuicy • 8 years ago

134 20 8 years ago

wired.com

NicoJuicy• 8 years ago

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

The question still remains...

aestetix• 8 years ago

"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.

danso3• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

dredmorbius2• 8 years ago

Possibly G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Domains).

https://gsuite.google.com

But it has a very bad smell about it. Rather like a brown shirt.

secfirstmd• 8 years ago

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."

fwdpropaganda2• 8 years ago

This is well known.

8_hours_ago• 8 years ago

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

e15ctr0n• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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

jacquesm2• 8 years ago

Lots of FB employees on HN. I take it they realize the importance of HN for recruitment purposes, if you can choose between Google and Facebook which you would choose might depend on what you read here. Not that that should even be a close decision.

rahu_• 8 years ago

Who flagged it? Someone from Facebook Trending Group?

thrusong• 8 years ago

It's really unfortunate this didn't have its day in the sun... It's an excellent piece.

danso3• 8 years ago

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...

SpikeDad• 8 years ago

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.

jacquesm2• 8 years ago

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.

Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years–and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix It All

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