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A Facebook Employee Asked a Reporter To Turn Off His Phone So Facebook Couldn't Track Its Location (businessinsider.com)
Steve Kovach, writing for BusinessInsider: To corporate giants like Facebook, leaks to rivals or the media are a cardinal sin. That notion was clear in a new Wired story about Facebook's rocky time over the last two years. The story talks about how Facebook was able to find two leakers who told a Gizmodo reporter about its news operations. But one source for the Wired story highlighted just how concerned employees are about how their company goes after leakers. According to the story, the source, a current Facebook employee, asked a Wired reporter to turn off his phone so Facebook wouldn't be able to use location tracking and see that the two were close to each other for the meeting. The Wired's 11,000-word wide-ranging piece, for which it spoke with more than 50 current and former Facebook employees, gives us an inside look at how the company has been struggling to curb spread of fake news; battling internal discrimination among employees; and becoming furious when anything leaks to the media. Another excerpt from the story: The day after Fearnow (a contractor who leaked information to a Gizmodo reporter) took that second screenshot was a Friday. When he woke up after sleeping in, he noticed that he had about 30 meeting notifications from Facebook on his phone. When he replied to say it was his day off, he recalls, he was nonetheless asked to be available in 10 minutes. Soon he was on a video-conference with three Facebook employees, including Sonya Ahuja, the company's head of investigations. According to his recounting of the meeting, she asked him if he had been in touch with Nunez (the Gizmodo reporter, who eventually published this and this). He denied that he had been. Then she told him that she had their messages on Gchat, which Fearnow had assumed weren't accessible to Facebook. He was fired. "Please shut your laptop and don't reopen it," she instructed him.
Is it me or does that company become more and more like some kind of cult?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But one source for the Wired story highlighted just how concerned employees are about how their company goes after leakers. According to the story, the source, a current Facebook employee, asked a Wired reporter to turn off his phone so Facebook wouldn't be able to use location tracking and see that the two were close to each other for the meeting.
And people wonder why I don't want to have anything to do with Facebook. If Facebook really is tracking people's location with that amount of accessible detail then I will never ever have an account with them and I will block them by every means I have available.
Why didn't the person who was leaking just leave his phone at home, then Facebook would have seen the journalist in one place and the leaker in another and not been concerned. Either turning off the phone is enough to disable the tracking, in which case either party can do it because the thing they're worried about is being seen together, or it isn't in which case why ask the reporter to do it?
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This makes me kind of smile, apparently it's not just the Facebook users that suffer a total loss of privacy but also their own employees.
I have little sympathy for FB users that get burned but it's even less for those evil enough to work there.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I hope it was a corporate device, potentially signaled by the "Please shut your laptop and don't reopen it" line. Otherwise that would be a shocking level of collusion.
They don't need you to have an account with them in order to track you.
Which is why I make heavy use of various ad blockers and privacy guarding software to prevent as much of that as possible. I'm well aware they try to track me but I try to not make it easy for them. For example on my current browser I have Privacy Badger, Ublock, and Adblock Plus as well as some stuff to block flash. I'll use every tool I can find to give them the figurative (and literal) middle finger.
99% of the time, the more powerful an entity becomes, the more it will exert it's power to keep (and usually increase) said power. It doesn't matter if that entity is a company, a government, or an individual.
Check what libraries you're including. Nothing is free...
So was he stupid enough to be using gchat on a corporate device or are Facebook guilty of hacking?
It was a corporate laptop.
Only a facebook owned and provisioned device would have access to the things he was taking screenshots of.
Their devices are no doubt setup to perform CA-cert MitM recording, as well as MitM all other traffic as well. They would have the chat logs that way.
I would like to think that facebook has their devices locked down to the point it either wouldn't have been possible to copy the screenshots off of it to another device for sending, but I can't say if that is true or not.
To be honest the leaker was being a bit naive at best and stupid at worst, only in what way is in question.
If facebooks laptops are restricted such that he wouldn't be able to copy files off of it without a record/snapshot, then he was stupid for assuming the screenshots wouldn't be recorded and not actually be deleted when he issued the delete command, but would be retained as a shadow copy until the next backup cycle ran.
If the devices don't prevent copying, the leaker is still at best naive to assume everything wasn't being recorded and routed through the facebook network, and at worst stupid for not at least copying the files off to another device that is doing the sending/chatting.
In the second case I'd personally give the guy a break with the "stupid" label.
Even copying the files off the company laptop and using Gchat from something personally owned, it's not like it would take much of a leap to match the screenshots made and recorded up against the news article images.
This is facebook internal investigations after all, they don't need a level of evidence that a court of law would require in order to fire the guy.
I really really hate these adware companies. They are like computer herpes that can't be gotten rid of.
Use a live distro. HD-installed software is for losers [unless your machine is air-gapped),
Leaving smartphone at home sounds like an idea, though..
check movement sensors of smartphone
check gps data of car
check financial transactions of credit cards
check laptop activity
and that's only for that person. There's all the public monitoring of people movements.
However, many of your friends, family, co-workers, etc, likely use Facebook, and in doing so may reveal much about you.
I've had this exact argument with several people. Some of them couldn't wrap their head around the fact that I: A) didn't want to be on facebook, B) resented them posting information about me without my permission, and C) resented that I had to police them from doing so which is difficult since I don't want to use Facebook in the first place. Even if I liked what Facebook offers (I don't) I still don't trust the company to be responsible with information about me.
I worry about my daughter because in her generation it's kind of hard to have a social life without using some social networking systems that often don't care at all about respecting privacy.