The fall of Facebook(FB) seems to have started as the way it conducts its business is being questioned by all its users located across the globe. First it is the former US President Donald Trump who questioned the business integrity of the Mark Zuckerberg led company and filed a legal allegation against the social media giant for trying to dominate the tech industry by adopting different marketing strategies by putting the user privacy at stake.
Now, news is out that the American tech giant has been firing over 3 engineers per month on an average for accessing user data fraudulently.
Journalist Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang published an e-book named ‘An ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle of Domination’ and stated that the social networking giant has fired over 52 of its employees between Jan’14 to Aug’15 for abusing their access to private user data.
Meaning, they were caught tracking the location of users, their names, their whereabouts, private messages, viewing deleted photos from their accounts, and what not!
Ms. Sheera’s revelation also discloses the truth on how seriously FB takes its user privacy.
For instance, a fired engineer was found accessing wealth of data of a woman with whom he went on a date and tracked her whereabouts when she was with another man in a different hotel after a week or so.
Another engineer who is a female was caught accessing the private messages sent by her partner to one his friends describing the date as ‘Horrible’ and later confronted him, that made him lodge a complaint against the female staff member with Facebook.
Technically, over 16,000 employees are reported to have access to the private user data at a time and it is not clear on how honest are they they for protecting the data of their company users.
The third incident revealed in the book is super- chilling as an engineer had access to Italian news anchors data and then followed her and bumped upon her in a San Francisco Park, after learning about her location data from the Facebook app installed on a smart phone.
It’s revealed that most of the engineers working for FB are always found searching for women profile data whom they were interested in. And such issues came to light in September 2015, as soon as Alex Stamos, the CSO took control of the business and vowed to protect the user data to the core from hackers, prying eyes and advertising agencies.
Hope, Mr. Zuckerberg took a note of such revelations and handled the situation wise.
