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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.
So was he stupid enough to be using gchat on a corporate device or are Facebook guilty of hacking?
Yeah, I'm assuming Google are innocent (on this occasion).
I use the 3rd party Metal app on Android for accessing Facebook. There's generally no way to prevent any app from accessing your location on Android, but Metal is intended to let you use Facebook without them having more information than they're entitled to.
iOS has stronger privacy safeguards. Google should learn from Apple about how to do that better.
...and shut his own phone down.
It's good that Facebook lost over 2 million 17-25 year olds last year and will lose even more this year.
It's becoming the GrannyBook, the over 55 years are joining mostly, which is poison for the young generation.
Facebook probably will have some way to see you are using a covert app, and probably be able to see other people who are using the app at the same time. Likewise google, may verywell be the DNS that originates this. And finally how can you be sure that Signal or Skype doesn't share it's transaction analysis with its "partners and customers" as the EULA you didn't read might say. And perhaps the person you are talking to is also taking notes in google docs, etc..
De-anominization isn't that hard. More to the point, you can't really know ahead of time if is. And finally, your early contacts with a reporter probably don't happen via covert channels. Few people plan ahead like Snowden.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Some people, including myself, believe that it is not only morally justifiable, but morally imperative, to leak evidence of wrongdoing, particularly at massive scale.
Is it me or does that company become more and more like some kind of cult?
Have you seen the movie The Circle? My first thought after seeing it was "Facebook". I find it to be extremely interesting that the wikipedia article linked above makes no mention whatsoever of the parallels. It was a really creepy movie.
This is an ex-parrot!
Just bought a new ZTE phone from Cricket Wireless... I found out that every cricket phone comes preloaded with a Wifi Manager application that is supposed to transition you between wifi and cell data automatically. If you agree to the EULA, it collects data about your phone and wifi and location and moves you between open wifi and data networks. Well this sounded like a bad idea so I reset the phone and didn't accept the EULA this time.
Turns out that the data collection happens whether or not you accept the EULA. GPS info if you leave it on, WIFI SSIDs, cell locations, IMEI, Phone ID, data traffic levels...
The offending app was from smithmicro and could not be disabled. I ended up in debug mode on adb shell and was able to uninstall the package for current user (not something Joe schmoe's grandma will do).
My point is, you may think that no one is watching so long as you remove FB or other apps, but your location data and patterns is more valuable than the $50 the company gets for selling you service.
Putin has stated that the Americans have created a better KGB than the KGB ever could have.
That part they can do for their own internal use by correlating any public data.
They have his location data, his Google Chat data (hangouts?), and other stuff. ... what? Hold on, something is wrong here. People require some measure of privacy, and the capacity to peer into private conversations on other platforms is simply unacceptable.
We'll have to start a regulatory push to provide capacity for non-breakable end-to-end encryption in text messaging and private messenger applications, perhaps as a legally-recognized implication of using the words "secure", "private", or "privacy" to describe conversations over these mediums. So "Facebook Messenger" can tell Facebook everything you say, in plain text, on their servers, as long as it's not described by Facebook as "Secure" or "Private"; whereas a messenger such as WhatsApp using double-ratchet end-to-end can claim your conversations are "Private", so long as the application is designed with the good-faith intent (meaning yes, you have to use secure protocols and encryption algorithms) to ensure no entity besides the communicating parties can read the messages.
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Aaaand this is just highlighting why Facebook needs to be federally regulated. They have every right to fire a leaking employee, but I am pretty sure that how they figured it out is a violation of a number of laws. Even if they have access to said information for advertising purposes through the employees Facebook page, there is a whole different set of regulations as to what an employer can do to spy on an employee, especially on their days off...
It is high time the technocrats running Google, Facebook and Twitter go the hard slap down of federal regulation. They are just companies and they have been abusing their increasing power for far too long already.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I own and operate a small business. I occasionally run my business name through google just to see what turns up about it.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my business has a facebook page! According to facebook's help pages, I believe that the facebook page was automatically created when people "check in" (whatever that means).
I can apparently claim that page if I send facebook some documentation to prove that I own my business. But I can't delete it.
I have zero intention of claiming that page and rewarding facebook for their slimy behaviour in setting it up behind my back, though. And why would I want to intentionally forward even more information to facebook to prove that I own my business?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!