5 ms·

Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee

110 points by blasdel 17y ago

potatolicious 17y ago
The Facebook employee: - checked a guest named "Phil Wong" into the new Facebook office in the recent past (after the move) - is a woman Holy shit guys, "anonymity"? Protecting her job? I think not.
- blasdel 17y ago
  I think it's supposed to be anonymous to GoogleBot + 4chan, not to Facebook. Pretty much every tidbit that isn't normally in FB press releases would be an identifying detail, even the sentence structure. Who's to say 'she' isn't a composite or fabricated anyway?
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    "I think it's supposed to be anonymous to GoogleBot + 4chan, not to Facebook." I would hope it's supposed to be anonymous to Facebook - after all, there were some fairly frank discussions on topics that aren't exactly public knowledge (e.g., Facebook tracking clicks and other little bits of things that really should be revealed by PR, not an employee in an unsanctioned conversation). "Who's to say 'she' isn't a composite or fabricated anyway?" Well, in that case the author never visited Facebook's offices - that's the detail that gives away the employee's identity. Given the level of detail gone into by the author, I doubt this is fabricated. It would probably be better for everyone if it were, though, because he just made a real big boo-boo that will probably cost someone their job.
    - alttab 17y ago
      If not the interviewees. I was reading this and thinking "holy crap this is a meaty interview" while simultaneously thinking "there's no way Mark won't find this girl and gut her." Maybe not because the information she gave was all that important (although the HPHP thing certainly is an interesting piece of information), but to make an example to other employees about babbling on about the internal workings of their enterprise. Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly might be paying her a visit shortly.
      - cag_ii 17y ago
        > although the HPHP thing certainly is an interesting piece of information Except that the employees description of the differences between "scripted" and compiled languages leads me to think that this person doesn't really know much about programming languages.
        brown9-2 17y ago
        Sounds like he/she was really just trying to dumb it down for the interviewer, someone who didn't understand what "eyeball-tracking" was or thought that Facebook's servers were hosted in their offices.
        alttab 17y ago
        I was thinking the same thing. I get the feeling the PHP is probably compiled into some C or C++ format. The speed increase would work wonders for the production server, and if you didn't change HPHP too much from regular PHP, you could still run interpreted for development. For scaling, I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing hybrid models like this in the future.
      - kulkarnic 17y ago
        Wellll.... I don't know if it's meaty at all. Nothing in there actually is revealing: yeah, they do eye-tracking. So does every serious outfit. They store all the data they create: yes, it's nearly free to do that (relatively speaking), and I'd be surprised if they didn't do it (nearly all graph algorithms they should employ will benefit from more data to train/test); they're creating Hyper-PHP--great etc, but you'd really think twice before creating your own site on PHP, so it's a non-issue for me at least. Bonus: I'm also certain they have their own front-end engineering which is speeding up javascript. Nearly everyone else does, and getting that 0.5s page-load will certainly need this boost.
- tjic 17y ago
  She's not a woman - "her" word choice was totally male. That detail is just a really poor attempt at anonymization, IMO.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    How do you know that the responses aren't all paraphrased?
  - mcantor 17y ago
    The diction struck me as quite masculine, as well.
larsberg 17y ago
"I don’t think there’s any question that Stanford is the number one CS department in the world." Whomever it is certainly is a Stanford graduate :-)
- alexgartrell 17y ago
  "Employee: We’re going to reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%, so practically, users will just see this as a faster site. Pages will load in one fifth of the time that they used to." With gems like that, one can't help but deduce that, if anonymous employee IS a Stanford grad, Stanford is the best CS department in the world. I mean, they seem to have invented the zero-latency, infinite bandwidth internet, where all network operations are CPU bound! The average Stanford Kid is about the same as the average MIT kid is about the same as the average CMU kid. The most brilliant Ohio State kid is likely about as smart as the most brilliant MIT kid. [Edited to be less snarky :)]
  - otto 17y ago
    I'd agree with that completely. My roommate recently interviewed with Facebook(we attend a state school in the midwest). The other candidates were going around saying where they were from, many were from Stanford, and when it came to him they basically snubbed him afterwards. That said in programming competitions we've beaten schools like UIUC.
- manbearpig 17y ago
  She's just calling it like she sees it. And she sees it each and every day. With lesser engineers, Facebook would've degraded into MySpace very quickly.
- CalmQuiet 17y ago
  If a graduate at all. Consider: "PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script,..." Hard to remember the last time my browser was reading a server-side script. ( or was it just "all those beers" they were drinking? )
robryan 17y ago
It makes a lot of sense for a site of facebook's size to do away with most of the dynamic language coded stuff on the backend. In terms of identity, this is facebook, I'm sure they could work out what employee it was (if it was an employee) without the office visit details.
thejo 17y ago
Many SaaS products, especially enterprise software, have a "login as a different user" feature that engineers use for debugging. It's good that non tech savvy users aren't always aware of the amount of information leakage that happens in situations where privacy is important. It would lead to a mega freak out. For example, if you receive SMS alerts from your bank about transactions, account balance etc. there are multiple engineers in the chain who have access to the information, but should not - * At the SMS gateway company to which the bank has outsourced the services * Your mobile service provider * People who run the SMSC (if the mobile operator has outsourced that) Unfortunately, there is no way to secure it end to end in its current form. The same is applicable to a lot of services.
- pyre 17y ago
  > Unfortunately, there is no way to secure it end to end in its current form How about supporting public key encryption for SMS? Oh sorry, I forgot that the government wouldn't like that too much. Everything should be out in the open so that everyone can view it to make it easier for law enforcement (at the same time making it easier for criminals to access the information of 'normal/average' people).
  - thejo 17y ago
    > How about supporting public key encryption for SMS? The protocol in its current widely deployed form does not support it.
charliepark 17y ago
They mention having a "global" password that allows access to any user account. I've thought about doing this in the past, as a means of troubleshooting user support requests, but haven't implemented it on any sites. Are there better ways of doing this, rather than having a global admin backdoor password? Is there a recommended "best practice" for logging in as a user, to see what they see when they use the app? I get a decent number of support requests where the user is seeing something in particular, and my being able to see it would be useful. At the same time, there's a pretty serious risk that's opened up by having this in place. Anyone have any thoughts / suggestions?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- nfriedly 17y ago
  I have a "login as this user" link in my admin panel. Once I click it, I see what they see. The only downside is that I have to log out and log back in to get back to my admin account, but I usually keep myself logged in in firefox and do the testing in IE, so this isn't that big of a deal.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  This might be horrible idea from a security perspective, and if it is, please tell me, but what about allowing the hashed password in the password field, that way, you could copy it from the db, and sign in?
  - charliepark 17y ago
    That seems like a really good way to handle it. Each account has a unique password, then, and it's only available to the admin. As long as the controller's coded well, this seems like a great solution. (If anyone has any concerns, I'd love to hear them.)
    - swolchok 17y ago
      Well, it doesn't sound bad, until you rephrase it to how it will actually be implemented: How about allowing the contents of the hash column in the database as the password? It only takes one incompetent engineer to sometimes store the raw password in the database, and it takes two to make that work to log in somewhere (presumably an easy defense is to only allow "verbatim logins" using something the same length as a hash).
bmalicoat 17y ago
It's probably just because I don't go to Stanford or Harvard, but I think it's silly and diversity-lacking to have almost all your hires come from those two schools. Good CS students can come from elsewhere, though they are probably a bit harder to sift out.
- rudd 17y ago
  It may be unfair to candidates trying to get a job at Facebook if they didn't come from Stanford or Harvard, but it's completely reasonable to focus their hiring efforts on those two schools. It makes it less work for them. As a plus for non-Stanford/Harvard grads, it means if you don't want to work for Facebook, you have less competition from Stanford/Harvard grads!
- tedunangst 17y ago
  It only takes about 25% of a company to come from one place for it to seem like "everyone" comes from there, especially if any other individual school is no more than a few percent.
seldo 17y ago
I am completely shocked by "her" casual admission that Facebook employees have in the past logged in as other users on a whim, and potentially continue to do so via database access and user-switching. In some countries -- for instance the UK -- data protection laws mean that viewing personal data without a specific business reason is itself illegal, even if that data is not manipulated (this may be why the new user switching system requires a reason to be entered). Even if this casual viewing was done before they opened a data center in the UK, this seems a pretty shocking admission to make so casually.
- seiji 17y ago
  That used to be on their job postings. "Get inside information about your friends! See all their private details!" (or something similar) I think their foster mother has tried to make them grow up a little.
- gaius 17y ago
  I am completely shocked by "her" casual admission that Facebook employees have in the past logged in as other users on a whim I doubt there's any company that has user data that this doesn't happen at. I bet it happened a hundred years ago at mail order companies. A claim that it had never happened somewhere would be suspicious.
fjabre 17y ago
Everything in here sounds believable and I have no doubt that things like that have happened and do continue to happen at FB.. My only problem with this interview is that it seems very scripted.. Either this person had the questions in advance, the interview is an elaborate hoax, or she just happens to be really articulate and alert after a few beers.
ntoshev 17y ago
The facts that Facebook saves and keeps all interaction and user generated data and their engineers can access that data should be nothing new to you: Google, Amazon and every sane internet company do it too because they want to make decisions based on data. The author clearly doesn't understand what he is talking about and doesn't try too hard to understand it; he wants to be sensational instead. Oh well.
- loup-vaillant 17y ago
  They don't need the raw data to make decision. Statistics are enough (and even better, most of the time). Keeping information that almost anyone would think of as private (search history for Google, list of purchased goods for Amazon) is insane. Literally. This kind of data can sort people by political opinion and sexual preferences, for one thing. This kind of data has already been used to spot or incriminate dissent. At the scale of these companies, this can go very wrong. How they are using this data right now isn't relevant. The fact that every big internet company is doing it doesn't make it acceptable. The fact that no one bother doesn't make it normal. The risks are just too high.
  - ntoshev 17y ago
    You need the raw data in order to be able to calculate statistics in the future about relations you don't anticipate now. Also keeping only aggregated numbers would mean you give up on data mining. I don't know if this use of data is "insane", but companies doing it get a clear competitive advantage over the rest. If governments decide to restrict it with some kind of regulation, there would be a clear cost in a less efficient economy. People are willing to give up privacy in order to gain convenience, otherwise they wouldn't be using these services. All these factors say we are going to see more data gathering in the future.
    - loup-vaillant 17y ago
      The advantages you speak of seems stronger than what I was thinking about. But I still think the current trade off is too dangerous. Plus, I disagre about people willingly giving up privacy. I think most of them either undervalue their privacy or don't know they are giving it up.
motters 17y ago
I'm somewhat disquieted by these admissions, and I think that eventually there are going to be some social networking privacy scandals. Ultimately the solution is probably a peer-to-peer equivalent to facebook.
mattmanser 17y ago
For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Well, at least we know the end of facebook is coming then ;)

110 points by blasdel 17y ago

The Facebook employee: - checked a guest named "Phil Wong" into the new Facebook office in the recent past (after the move) - is a woman Holy shit guys, "anonymity"? Protecting her job? I think not.

blasdel 17y ago
I think it's supposed to be anonymous to GoogleBot + 4chan, not to Facebook. Pretty much every tidbit that isn't normally in FB press releases would be an identifying detail, even the sentence structure. Who's to say 'she' isn't a composite or fabricated anyway?
- potatolicious 17y ago
  "I think it's supposed to be anonymous to GoogleBot + 4chan, not to Facebook." I would hope it's supposed to be anonymous to Facebook - after all, there were some fairly frank discussions on topics that aren't exactly public knowledge (e.g., Facebook tracking clicks and other little bits of things that really should be revealed by PR, not an employee in an unsanctioned conversation). "Who's to say 'she' isn't a composite or fabricated anyway?" Well, in that case the author never visited Facebook's offices - that's the detail that gives away the employee's identity. Given the level of detail gone into by the author, I doubt this is fabricated. It would probably be better for everyone if it were, though, because he just made a real big boo-boo that will probably cost someone their job.
  - alttab 17y ago
    If not the interviewees. I was reading this and thinking "holy crap this is a meaty interview" while simultaneously thinking "there's no way Mark won't find this girl and gut her." Maybe not because the information she gave was all that important (although the HPHP thing certainly is an interesting piece of information), but to make an example to other employees about babbling on about the internal workings of their enterprise. Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly might be paying her a visit shortly.
    - cag_ii 17y ago
      > although the HPHP thing certainly is an interesting piece of information Except that the employees description of the differences between "scripted" and compiled languages leads me to think that this person doesn't really know much about programming languages.
      - brown9-2 17y ago
        Sounds like he/she was really just trying to dumb it down for the interviewer, someone who didn't understand what "eyeball-tracking" was or thought that Facebook's servers were hosted in their offices.
        alttab 17y ago
        I was thinking the same thing. I get the feeling the PHP is probably compiled into some C or C++ format. The speed increase would work wonders for the production server, and if you didn't change HPHP too much from regular PHP, you could still run interpreted for development. For scaling, I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing hybrid models like this in the future.
    - kulkarnic 17y ago
      Wellll.... I don't know if it's meaty at all. Nothing in there actually is revealing: yeah, they do eye-tracking. So does every serious outfit. They store all the data they create: yes, it's nearly free to do that (relatively speaking), and I'd be surprised if they didn't do it (nearly all graph algorithms they should employ will benefit from more data to train/test); they're creating Hyper-PHP--great etc, but you'd really think twice before creating your own site on PHP, so it's a non-issue for me at least. Bonus: I'm also certain they have their own front-end engineering which is speeding up javascript. Nearly everyone else does, and getting that 0.5s page-load will certainly need this boost.
tjic 17y ago
She's not a woman - "her" word choice was totally male. That detail is just a really poor attempt at anonymization, IMO.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  How do you know that the responses aren't all paraphrased?
- mcantor 17y ago
  The diction struck me as quite masculine, as well.

larsberg 17y ago

"I don’t think there’s any question that Stanford is the number one CS department in the world." Whomever it is certainly is a Stanford graduate :-)

alexgartrell 17y ago
"Employee: We’re going to reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%, so practically, users will just see this as a faster site. Pages will load in one fifth of the time that they used to." With gems like that, one can't help but deduce that, if anonymous employee IS a Stanford grad, Stanford is the best CS department in the world. I mean, they seem to have invented the zero-latency, infinite bandwidth internet, where all network operations are CPU bound! The average Stanford Kid is about the same as the average MIT kid is about the same as the average CMU kid. The most brilliant Ohio State kid is likely about as smart as the most brilliant MIT kid. [Edited to be less snarky :)]
- otto 17y ago
  I'd agree with that completely. My roommate recently interviewed with Facebook(we attend a state school in the midwest). The other candidates were going around saying where they were from, many were from Stanford, and when it came to him they basically snubbed him afterwards. That said in programming competitions we've beaten schools like UIUC.
manbearpig 17y ago
She's just calling it like she sees it. And she sees it each and every day. With lesser engineers, Facebook would've degraded into MySpace very quickly.
CalmQuiet 17y ago
If a graduate at all. Consider: "PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script,..." Hard to remember the last time my browser was reading a server-side script. ( or was it just "all those beers" they were drinking? )

robryan 17y ago

It makes a lot of sense for a site of facebook's size to do away with most of the dynamic language coded stuff on the backend. In terms of identity, this is facebook, I'm sure they could work out what employee it was (if it was an employee) without the office visit details.

thejo 17y ago

Many SaaS products, especially enterprise software, have a "login as a different user" feature that engineers use for debugging. It's good that non tech savvy users aren't always aware of the amount of information leakage that happens in situations where privacy is important. It would lead to a mega freak out. For example, if you receive SMS alerts from your bank about transactions, account balance etc. there are multiple engineers in the chain who have access to the information, but should not - * At the SMS gateway company to which the bank has outsourced the services * Your mobile service provider * People who run the SMSC (if the mobile operator has outsourced that) Unfortunately, there is no way to secure it end to end in its current form. The same is applicable to a lot of services.

pyre 17y ago
> Unfortunately, there is no way to secure it end to end in its current form How about supporting public key encryption for SMS? Oh sorry, I forgot that the government wouldn't like that too much. Everything should be out in the open so that everyone can view it to make it easier for law enforcement (at the same time making it easier for criminals to access the information of 'normal/average' people).
- thejo 17y ago
  > How about supporting public key encryption for SMS? The protocol in its current widely deployed form does not support it.

charliepark 17y ago

They mention having a "global" password that allows access to any user account. I've thought about doing this in the past, as a means of troubleshooting user support requests, but haven't implemented it on any sites. Are there better ways of doing this, rather than having a global admin backdoor password? Is there a recommended "best practice" for logging in as a user, to see what they see when they use the app? I get a decent number of support requests where the user is seeing something in particular, and my being able to see it would be useful. At the same time, there's a pretty serious risk that's opened up by having this in place. Anyone have any thoughts / suggestions?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
nfriedly 17y ago
I have a "login as this user" link in my admin panel. Once I click it, I see what they see. The only downside is that I have to log out and log back in to get back to my admin account, but I usually keep myself logged in in firefox and do the testing in IE, so this isn't that big of a deal.
euroclydon 17y ago
This might be horrible idea from a security perspective, and if it is, please tell me, but what about allowing the hashed password in the password field, that way, you could copy it from the db, and sign in?
- charliepark 17y ago
  That seems like a really good way to handle it. Each account has a unique password, then, and it's only available to the admin. As long as the controller's coded well, this seems like a great solution. (If anyone has any concerns, I'd love to hear them.)
  - swolchok 17y ago
    Well, it doesn't sound bad, until you rephrase it to how it will actually be implemented: How about allowing the contents of the hash column in the database as the password? It only takes one incompetent engineer to sometimes store the raw password in the database, and it takes two to make that work to log in somewhere (presumably an easy defense is to only allow "verbatim logins" using something the same length as a hash).

bmalicoat 17y ago

It's probably just because I don't go to Stanford or Harvard, but I think it's silly and diversity-lacking to have almost all your hires come from those two schools. Good CS students can come from elsewhere, though they are probably a bit harder to sift out.

rudd 17y ago
It may be unfair to candidates trying to get a job at Facebook if they didn't come from Stanford or Harvard, but it's completely reasonable to focus their hiring efforts on those two schools. It makes it less work for them. As a plus for non-Stanford/Harvard grads, it means if you don't want to work for Facebook, you have less competition from Stanford/Harvard grads!
tedunangst 17y ago
It only takes about 25% of a company to come from one place for it to seem like "everyone" comes from there, especially if any other individual school is no more than a few percent.

seldo 17y ago

I am completely shocked by "her" casual admission that Facebook employees have in the past logged in as other users on a whim, and potentially continue to do so via database access and user-switching. In some countries -- for instance the UK -- data protection laws mean that viewing personal data without a specific business reason is itself illegal, even if that data is not manipulated (this may be why the new user switching system requires a reason to be entered). Even if this casual viewing was done before they opened a data center in the UK, this seems a pretty shocking admission to make so casually.

seiji 17y ago
That used to be on their job postings. "Get inside information about your friends! See all their private details!" (or something similar) I think their foster mother has tried to make them grow up a little.
gaius 17y ago
I am completely shocked by "her" casual admission that Facebook employees have in the past logged in as other users on a whim I doubt there's any company that has user data that this doesn't happen at. I bet it happened a hundred years ago at mail order companies. A claim that it had never happened somewhere would be suspicious.

fjabre 17y ago

Everything in here sounds believable and I have no doubt that things like that have happened and do continue to happen at FB.. My only problem with this interview is that it seems very scripted.. Either this person had the questions in advance, the interview is an elaborate hoax, or she just happens to be really articulate and alert after a few beers.

ntoshev 17y ago

The facts that Facebook saves and keeps all interaction and user generated data and their engineers can access that data should be nothing new to you: Google, Amazon and every sane internet company do it too because they want to make decisions based on data. The author clearly doesn't understand what he is talking about and doesn't try too hard to understand it; he wants to be sensational instead. Oh well.

loup-vaillant 17y ago
They don't need the raw data to make decision. Statistics are enough (and even better, most of the time). Keeping information that almost anyone would think of as private (search history for Google, list of purchased goods for Amazon) is insane. Literally. This kind of data can sort people by political opinion and sexual preferences, for one thing. This kind of data has already been used to spot or incriminate dissent. At the scale of these companies, this can go very wrong. How they are using this data right now isn't relevant. The fact that every big internet company is doing it doesn't make it acceptable. The fact that no one bother doesn't make it normal. The risks are just too high.
- ntoshev 17y ago
  You need the raw data in order to be able to calculate statistics in the future about relations you don't anticipate now. Also keeping only aggregated numbers would mean you give up on data mining. I don't know if this use of data is "insane", but companies doing it get a clear competitive advantage over the rest. If governments decide to restrict it with some kind of regulation, there would be a clear cost in a less efficient economy. People are willing to give up privacy in order to gain convenience, otherwise they wouldn't be using these services. All these factors say we are going to see more data gathering in the future.
  - loup-vaillant 17y ago
    The advantages you speak of seems stronger than what I was thinking about. But I still think the current trade off is too dangerous. Plus, I disagre about people willingly giving up privacy. I think most of them either undervalue their privacy or don't know they are giving it up.

motters 17y ago

I'm somewhat disquieted by these admissions, and I think that eventually there are going to be some social networking privacy scandals. Ultimately the solution is probably a peer-to-peer equivalent to facebook.

mattmanser 17y ago

For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Well, at least we know the end of facebook is coming then ;)