FACEBOOK TRACKS YOUR EVERY MOVE, EMPLOYEE CLAIMS
Tert.am
11:50 ~U 21.01.10
Facebook is tracking your every move on the site – or so says one
purported Facebook employee, according to an anonymous interview with
the Rumpus, reports PC World.
In the interview, the Facebook employee, whose identity was protected
so she wouldn’t lose her job for talking to the media, also said that
Facebook employees have relatively easy access to user accounts.
Here are the highlights from the interview:
Facebook Tracks You
Every time you view a profile, look at a picture, send a message or
take any other action on Facebook, the company records that action,
according to the Facebook employee. At first glance, that sounds like a
scary prospect, but the engineer argues that the company does this to
deliver a better product. As a result of this tracking, for example,
you can get suggestions to reconnect with a Facebook friend.
The employee also claimed that as a result of Facebook’s tracking,
when you search for a friend on Facebook the auto complete function
lists your friends by the people you interact with the most.
Universal Access
There used to be a universal password that Facebook employees could use
to view any Facebook account, the anonymous employee claims. But the
password has since been discontinued, and now Facebook uses a different
system where employees must provide a reason in writing for logging
into a user’s account. If the employee cannot back up the reason they
had for accessing someone’s account the employee can be fired.
Facebook Can Read Your Messages
The employee claims that Facebook has all of your messages, deleted or
not, stored in a database that any Facebook employee can access. The
notion that your Facebook messages are stored in a database is about
as stunning a discovery as finding out my laptop has a keyboard,
writes Ian Paul in PC World.
Then again, if any Facebook employee can just query that database
to read your personal messages any time they like, well, that’s a
problem. I certainly hope Facebook has better safeguards for personal
messages than that.
So what do we make of all this? According to the author, "Personally,
I don’t think these issues are too concerning. The bigger issue
around Facebook and security isn’t with Facebook itself, but all
those third-party services that have access to your data whenever
you authorize a Facebook application."