I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.

These contractors were hired to view this data. Your defense of Meta here doesn't make sense. Meta fired them for speaking out about the data Meta collects, not because they saw the data they were hired to look at.

The problem is that your comment and the one you're responding to can both be true: Just because the rules are heavily enforced does not mean the right rules are in place, starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.

There's no allegation that these workers abused their access. The allegation is that their routine work reviewing footage included private content. The revelation is that USERS are using meta glasses non-consensually.

Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.

Indeed, on this one point, Meta has higher standards than the NSA used to - Snowden mentioned that employees tracked their current wives/girlfriends so often it unofficially got the codename LOVEINT.

Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.

Anecdotal of course, but I heard that this wasn't at all the case circa 2006 and that (then) FB employees would routinely read private messages and such. Obviously it wasn't a big company yet and probably didn't have those policies yet... (clearly the policies are there for a reason...)

As someone who worked for a contractor which had Meta as a client, I disagree.

All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.

> I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

When did FaceBook make the world not-worse?

@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226756

@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47225130

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Yea but no. Meta is a defense contractor that hires out to 3rd parties exactly to do this. so you guys don't get to do that, but a lot of other people are. I hope that helped you sleep at night while you were there. But yea, it all gets bought and sold at the end of the day.

The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it

You're still on the koolaid, as many replies here accurately point out. Saying it's not because you're eager to defend them is lying to yourself, because you're smart enough to think of most of these replies yourself. Primarily the fact that these are contractors whose entire job is to watch smart glasses footage and the point your bringing up - even if we believe it at face value - is completely irrelevant to this post.

If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.