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Facebook Security Chief Said To Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation (theverge.com)
Facebook's chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, will leave the company after internal disagreements over how the social network should deal with its role in spreading disinformation. The New York Times reports (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Mr. Stamos had been a strong advocate inside the company for investigating and disclosing Russian activity on Facebook, often to the consternation of other top executives, including Sheryl Sandberg, the social network's chief operating officer, according to the current and former employees, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. After his day-to-day responsibilities were reassigned to others in December, Mr. Stamos said he would leave the company. He was persuaded to stay through August to oversee the transition of his duties because executives thought his departure would look bad, the current and former employees said. He has been overseeing the transfer of his security team to Facebook's product and infrastructure divisions. His group, which once had 120 people, now has three, the current and former employees said. Mr. Stamos would be the first high-ranking employee to leave Facebook since controversy erupted over disinformation on its site. His departure is a sign of heightened leadership tensions at the company.
Quite the opposite, actually. As a IT security guy, it's my business to run tests such as phoning home, cross-site tracking, JS exploits, etc. Facebook is among the worst in this regard, with ad networks being chief among the perps. All of them are tracking the living daylights out of everyone. One of the most eye-opening things I've done in recent times is install a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole, which is a bit of software that blocks ads, beacons, trackers, etc. at the DNS level. There is a real-time DNS log that is truly eye opening. It's amazing who and what phones home on a somewhat sickening basis. The Pi-hole allows one to block this dreck as one sees fit, and I block it all.