Techie
9:04 PM | Sunday | 14 March 2010

Guess what? According to an anonymous Facebook employee, the social network has practically full access to user profile – even to items that users have deleted. And the only reason why Facebook would destroy your data is when they have to improve the performance of their service, and apparently not out of any concern for privacy.

Worse, the employee even mentioned a "master password," which basically gave Facebook workers who knew about it full access to anyone's profile:

I'm not sure when exactly it was deprecated [discouraged, but not necessarily disabled], but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out 'Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

More dirt on Facebook: The site keeps track of practically everything its users do, from where they click on (used to make the site faster and easier to use) to the friends they interact most with (for sorting the list that appears when you type on the search box).

Personally, there's nothing wrong with this, because this is all for improving the user's experience. I do hope though the data generated by the tracking is made anonymous, not tied to specific users when presented to the engineers. Based on what the employee said, Facebook also needs a more proactive stance towards deleting old data.

You can find the full interview here. Besides raising concerns about privacy, the employee played the Pied Piper, summarizing the proficient work environment at Facebook:

They're weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, I'd say, 90% in PHP. All the front end — everything you see — is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he's literally rewriting the entire language… [he] is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you’d have with a human being in your entire life. You just can't talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he'd get it. And there's a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.

Photo by Bryan Veloso