Use Illegal Data Access To Spy On Women, 52 Facebook Employees Fired

JAKARTA - The social media Facebook has reportedly fired 52 employees. Not because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but because their employees have abused the right to access data provided by the company.

Quoted from The Sun, Thursday, July 22, this incident was first disclosed by Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief security officer. Stamos made CEO Mark Zuckerberg aware of the issue in September 2015.

Stamos initially thought Facebook employees were abusing their data access for spying purposes on a monthly basis. About 16,000 employees are said to have had access to the data before the issue began to be addressed.

However, most of those who abuse this data access are Facebook engineers themselves. The Telegraph reports, there is one case where a Facebook engineer was on vacation with a woman in Europe when the two had an argument and the woman wanted some alone time. However, the engineer used Facebook data to track the whereabouts of the woman, and her new hotel.

In another case, an engineer reportedly used Facebook data to find out that a woman he liked was known to frequent Dolores Park in San Francisco. Then the engineer used the information to go there and find it with his friends.

Meanwhile, another Facebook engineer is said to have used his data access to secretly spy on a woman who stopped responding to her messages after a failed date.

The engineer had access to the woman's private conversations over the years with friends via Facebook messenger, events she attended, photos uploaded including those that were deleted, and posts that were commented on or clicked on. She is also said to be accessing her location data because the woman has the Facebook app on her phone.

The majority of engineers who misuse personal information are men who seek out women they like but don't dare to confront them head-on. The two cases were quoted from a forthcoming book written by New York Times reporters Sheera Frankel and Cecelia Kang.

While 52 employees were fired for the breach in 2014 and 2015, Stamos reportedly warned that hundreds more may have escaped unnoticed.

Upon learning of this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg allegedly got angry and asked why no one else at the company had thought of tightening engineers' access to the data.

But Zuckerberg himself has designed the company's data access system and refuses to change it as the company grows.

"At various times in Facebook's history there were paths we could take, decisions we could make that would limit, or even reduce, the user data we collect," a longtime Facebook employee told Frankel and Kang.

"But it goes against Mark's DNA. Even before we took that option to him, we knew it was not the path he would choose."

Meanwhile, a Facebook spokesperson said, "We have zero tolerance for abuse and have fired any employee found to be accessing data improperly. Since 2015, we have continued to strengthen employee training, abuse detection and prevention protocols. We are also continuing to reduce the need for engineers to access multiple types of data as they work to build and support our services."