Facebook is the most popular social networking website in the world. It has over 350 million active users, and as such, hosts a very large amount of personal data. However, most people don't realize how dangerous this can be, as an anonymous Facebook employee explained in a recent interview.
The interview, posted on The Rumpus, revealed how easy to access your data is to anybody at Facebook. The interview is quite lengthy, though it does reveal some rather worrying facts:
Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
Employee: I'm not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user's user ID, and then the password. I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out 'Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.
Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn't as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.
The anonymous employee continued to state that not only could any Facebook employee access your data should they look in the right places, but in the past, several people had done just that. One employee was fired after having changes a person's listed religious belief on the site, and the employee in the interview has used their privileges to view other profiles.
Rumpus: Would you suppose that Facebook employees might read people's messages?
Employee: See, the thing is — and I don't know how much you know about it — it's all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That's what most people don't understand.
Rumpus: So the master password is basically irrelevant.
Employee: Yeah.
However, the managers at Facebook are strict; if an employee doesn't have a good excuse for logging in as another person, then they'll get into serious trouble. In fact, they even appointed a Chief Privacy Officer, just to ensure things stay as secure as they can be.
Lastly, the employee notes that the social networking site tracks every move that you make. Be it viewing a photo, writing a comment or just writing a wall post, it will be tracked. This is another lesson of how careful one should be when exposing personal data on the Internet, though it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anybody in this day and age. No company is perfect, though it's still interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes. We'll leave you with an excerpt about Facebook's stereotypical nerdy engineers.
Rumpus: So tell me about the engineers.
Employee: They're weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, I'd say, 90% in PHP. All the front end — everything you see — is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he's literally rewriting the entire language. There's this distinction in coding between a scripted language and a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top. But with a compiled language, the program you write is compiled into an executable file. It doesn't have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands. It's much faster that way. So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you'd have with a human being in your entire life. You just can't talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he'd get it. And there's a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.
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