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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.
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?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.