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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.
Problem avoided. This also will avoid any possibility of anatomically embedded FB chips being used to suss out the leaker as well.
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."
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).
What's a Gchat?? Did Google create another messenger (after what feels like 200 failed ones)...? And in any case, how does Facebook have access to it?!
If you can't take the battery out, how do you know it's off?
Whatever, like the other posters said above. If you work for Facebook, you ARE Facebook. I don't care if you're the janitor. You don't have to quit or anything. Just accept and embrace the evil that you do when you enable the enemy.
what are you complaining about? everyone gets a trophy.
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.
Trump wishes, but he won't get out this easily!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
NT
I would recommend Ghostery as well.
I tried it but it caused more problems than it solved. Not sure what the flaw was but it made things work VERY slowly when they worked at all. Maybe they've fixed the issues since I tried it last. I liked what it did but it just didn't work very well for me.
...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.
Lately it seems like it is acceptable to leak company/government secrets is not considered doing something wrong.
I keep finding some as malware like Spigot or Conduit has wormed itself into my broswers. The way that crap works is it's capturing and editing all your transmissions and receptions to analyse content, inject ads, and to track correlations across sites. So even if you think you are clean you may not be and even if you are using your personal computing devices they very well can correlate you back to your work devices just by the websites you visit.
I really really hate these adware companies. They are like computer herpes that can't be gotten rid of.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Of course they are, and whether you realise or not, you gave them permission when you installed the app ... because that thing wants access to pretty much EVERYTHING.
Except I've never installed their app on any phone I've ever owned. Never will in the future either. So I just need to block them through the browser which is enough of a challenge as it is.
if you are P2P with no intermediary to tumble the connections then every router, gateway, backbone, and ISP knows exactly who is talking to who.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
While doing Android development i find it disturbing to say the least that while debugging my extremely basic app (think hello world) I see calls to Facebook and Amazon urls in my console logs.
WTH is up with that, I'm just a novice?
Caution: Contents under pressure
"Sonya Ahuja, the company's head of investigations .. told him that she had their messages on Gchat"
Well, a big fucking DOH!
--
sig: I'll bet you're the kind of guy that hangs round Reddit fapping off over pictures of furries and yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin
And ads. Oh and its owned by Microsoft
Good-bye
No amount of actual left-wing violence will ever stop the hand-wringing over potential right-wing violence.
There are ways of dealing with them.
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.
Location, Wifi, BlueTooth, NFC and all other wireless protocols should be off. unless you have a reason to have them on! You should also always use VPN / TOR proxies on your phone to mask it's location. This is a common problem and people need to wake up.
Police 2017: The criminal doesn't have a Facebook account, nor smart phone, nor credit card.......we are totally baffled.
Put your real phone in your girlfriend's purse, ask her to go shopping and then to a movie while you to meet this reporter.
If such basic precautions are not taken, why blame facebook?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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
... is that Facebook is that good and that thorough at tracking.
Did anyone have any doubt that Facebook would be trying to monitor its employees to the same level they do their customers^Wraw material?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I don't understand why someone would risk leaking company secrets to the media. What do they have to gain?
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Who buys American in 2018?
The problem is, he was planning to launch a media platform riding on him losing an election that was rigged by liberals and socialists, and using the advertising machinery around his presidential candidateship to give it eyeballs. The whole thing would've hinged on the conspiracy of his enemies and the establishment against him becoming the president of "the people", with even the party that allegedly supports him eventually turning against him and working against his election.
I think it's easy to see how this could have attracted a lot of interest from, well, pretty much everyone that feels that "the elites" run everything.
The problem is that he actually won. He can't step down. The legend for the whole thing hangs on him being cheated out of office by a mafia-like system holding Washington in a stranglehold, with both parties being in on it.
In other words, it was probably not the best thing for the US to have a president like Trump. But I am pretty sure it would have been devastating for the democratic culture and the trust in the political system if he had lost...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Facebook can scrape your hangouts data? How?
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