Slashdot Mirror
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?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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).
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.
...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.
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
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.
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