Undisclosed court records regarding the Facebook user data abuse case show that the company’s engineers said they had no idea what personal information about users they were collecting or where it was stored.
The Intercept reported in March that two veteran Facebook engineers were being questioned over the company’s collection of user data, in an ongoing lawsuit over the company’s alleged misappropriation of private user information related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by security (Chip Somodeville/Getty)
A transcript of the trial was published recently and shows engineers being questioned about what user information Facebook has and where it is located. Engineers have a simple answer – they don’t know.
In a hearing with Special Master Daniel Garry, a court-appointed subject matter expert tasked with resolving disclosure disputes, Garry sought to request the company to submit a final report on where user data might be stored. Facebook is in 55 subsystems of the company. Both Facebook engineers had a hard time estimating where this information might be stored.
“I’m trying to understand what we’re looking at at the most fundamental level of this list,” Garry said, to which Facebook CTO Eugene Zarashaw replied, “I don’t believe there’s a single person who can answer this question.” . . It will take a great deal of teamwork to answer that question.”
When asked how Facebook can track all the data associated with a single user account, Zarashou said, “It takes several teams on the advertising side to track exactly where the data is going. I would be surprised if there was even one person who could answer this narrow question clearly.
When asked about this, a Facebook spokesperson simply told the Intercept, “We have made and continue to make significant investments, including extensive data controls, to meet our privacy obligations and commitments.”
Read more about Intercept here.
Source: Breitbart
