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The Guardian has a piece that discussed the FB employees reaction to this leak and it was down right scary. Many calls for hiring workers "with integrity" on ta

The Guardian has a piece that discussed the FB employees reaction to this leak and it was down right scary. Many calls for hiring workers "with integrity" on talking about how this leak was destroying FB's perception as a great place to work. How scary it must be to work at a place with such an overwhelming "don't rock the boat" mentality. Leakers everywhere, and Google, FB, and Apple especially risk their jobs and their career to give the public an open look at places which hold overwhelming power over our personal lives. FB's internal perspective on privacy and goals are vital for the public to know, it shouldn't take the next massive breach of trust to trigger an investigation to learn the detais. A leaker, sorry, I mean someone "without integrity", in 2016 could have done a lot of good.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Most companies have held internal memos like this as private to the organization. Any breach of that is a firing offense. FB, Google, Apple, etc. are not doing anything that corporate America hasn't been doing for ... for I don't know how long. It is disconcerting how FB employees have come out in support of these ideas from the memo, though.
- marricks 9y ago
  I think big tech has it very different, given how much they know about their personal employees lives. Some information should leak within a healthy society so backlash and corrections can occur before an election might be compromised by a horrific breach. For a view on what's different an excerpt from a Guardian piece is below. --- “It’s horrifying how much they know,” he told the Guardian, on the condition of anonymity. “You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care about things’. But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police.” The public image of Silicon Valley’s tech giants is all colourful bicycles, ping-pong tables, beanbags and free food, but behind the cartoonish facade is a ruthless code of secrecy. They rely on a combination of Kool-Aid, digital and physical surveillance, legal threats and restricted stock units to prevent and detect intellectual property theft and other criminal activity. However, those same tools are also used to catch employees and contractors who talk publicly, even if it’s about their working conditions, misconduct or cultural challenges within the company. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-valley-internal-work-spying-surveillance-leakers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
  - amarkov 9y ago
    One of the important qualities of a great place to work is that decisions are made based on sober analysis rather than reflexive corrections. Maybe you're right, and Facebook is just too important to allow that, but I think it's fair for Facebook employees to be unhappy about this.
    - marricks 9y ago
      Do you honestly believe you can’t have both? I’m not saying all data should be public, what I am saying is if what you’re discussing is morally repugnant given your past history it shouldn’t surprise you if it gets leaked.
      - amarkov 9y ago
        The problem is that lots of people find lots of different things morally repugnant. If it's normalized for people to leak things that they consider morally repugnant, that means there are serious costs to engaging in any controversial discussion. There's no way I'm going to talk about diversity at my company if I think someone might go tell a reporter what I said; there's no viewpoint on the issue which isn't offensive to someone.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    I think we’ve all blocked out the scary part of Pinocchio, where the boys go to the carnival (Pleasure Island). Spoilers: it ends with them being treated as literal livestock.
734786710934 9y ago
What did leaking this memo actually accomplish? If you are someone who wants tech companies to be accountable for their impact on society you should welcome these internal conversations. All that the leak will do is make them less likely.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  There is the "WikiLeaks justification": leaking this memo will force Facebook to have more vigorous internal controls for locking down information, making them less efficient and hastening their downfall.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- marricks 9y ago
  Conversations where bosses tell their employees we should connect more people and grow the network no matter the cost? You're right we should have conversations about this, but publicly. Facebook surrendered it's right to discuss such things privately when it's willfully kept lax policies on sharing users data. Stuff like this should leak earlier so we can talk about it before, rather than after, awful things happen.
  - hype7 9y ago
    I’m far from the biggest fan of Facebook, but I’m absolutely a fan of playing devils advocate in an organization if for no other reason than to solicit reactions and get people engaged. As someone who will use this device sparingly when appropriate, that’s really what this post looked like to me (as opposed to someone who was in it to get terrorists signed up to fb... really?). I honestly feel sorry for the guy
    - thisiszilff 9y ago
      On the other hand, have we really gotten to the point where we have to try to provoke others into a debate? Why can't we state what we mean, what we think, what we're uncertain about, what questions we'd like to discuss in order to foster discussion instead of provoking it. Playing devil's advocate is fine when it's understood what's going on and why you're playing devil's advocate, but when there's ambiguity you play this game of "yes I said that I didn't mean it though" which ends up sounding weak as it does in those case. Devil's advocate is a great cognitive strategy for exploring an issue together, but it's a very poor conversational strategy.
kd5bjo 9y ago
I was a Facebook employee for several years; I left shortly before this memo was drafted. The environment was pretty much the opposite of "don't rock the boat." Dissenting opinions were encouraged and openly discussed, but everyone understood that could only happen if it didn't undermine the PR department's job. Boz fostered this culture by example, publishing internal memos critical of the company. In this case, questioning whether the company's driving mission was the universal good that leadership thought it was when it was adopted. Having such high-profile dissent in circulation gives more cover to individual contributors with a gripe than any amount of policy language would.
- marricks 9y ago
  Please don't try and spin the term "don't rock the boat." A company that brutally cracks down on leakers and has employees en masse calling them "people without integrity" is the epitome of that mentality. It's great they feel they created a microcosm of openness within the company, but that doesn't seem to have made it act any more morally when it comes to protecting user privacy.
  - amag 9y ago
    Scary, it seems like they use Newspeak internally.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"Boz fostered this culture by example, publishing internal memos critical of the company. " I read his memo titled "The Ugly." There was nothing in there that was critical of "the company." The only criticality I read was this individual being critical of people who might be prone to self-reflection. Judging from the memo and other employees characterizations of him "Boz" just sounds like a total asshole.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    Yes, it does seem like it. However, I would leave the door open a crack for irony. This is hard to judge out of context, but he has to have anticipated (encouraged?) pushback.
sambull 9y ago
The data driven espionage companies should be neutered. Ad's are a joke, that's not how they make their monies.
walshemj 9y ago
Be careful what you ask for FB'ers if fb etc get considered CNI your probley going to have to have security clearance if you access to sensitive data - which is going to suck even more so if your origionaly from outside of the states. I know that some Team leaders at one Uk telco I worked at where asked to go through DV clearance - That's TS (drug tests polygraph) in USA terms.
skybrian 9y ago
I don't know about Facebook in particular, but what you're missing is that the reason employees can debate internally about policy is that they trust it won't leak externally. The risk of leaks eventually results in companies clamping down on security, so most employees aren't told anything that's not already public, unless they need it for their job. (Much like Apple has been all along, where employees only know what they need to know.) So I would ask you where you'd rather work? At an employer that trusts you not to leak stuff, or somewhere that doesn't trust you? If it's the latter, you might as well be a contractor. You'll find this is true in most organizations, not just companies. They want to know if they can trust you with their secrets. It does require some faith that internal debate will help the organization make good decisions most of the time, which admittedly can be a stretch sometimes.
- marricks 9y ago
  How about a company where decisions are shared internally and employees feel empowered enough to speak up, *externally if needed, against what they see as an injustice when internally nothing is done? That shouldn't be too much to ask for. Perhaps some tech unions are needed to enforce this, as shareholders and owners would probably rather have just the dichotomy you presented. This just reveals how big the power imbalance is between employees and executives that we’d have to make such decisions.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    When you say speak up, do you mean internally or externally?
    - marricks 9y ago
      I thought it’d be clear but I added clarification. Speaking up internally when you’re not on the board often doesn’t get much done. At least if it’s a moral objection.
      - skybrian 9y ago
bad_user 9y ago
Arguing that internal company discussions should be all public is like arguing that people should have no privacy. That's a slippery slope. For example, how would you feel if you told your spouse about the grudges you have with your friends or work colleagues, then (s)he goes out and tells on you? That wouldn't be a very happy marriage imo. In society people that spread gossip are marginalized by those that hate gossip, because we have private affairs that we'd like to keep private. It's a natural phenomenon. And yes, I see the irony of defending Facebook by invoking privacy. I try not to have double standards.
- c5karl 9y ago
  This is a company that wants to be the default medium for private communications among friends and loved ones, yet deliberately makes security settings opaque and actively encourages oversharing. Anyone who doesn't see that analogy -- especially those employed at Facebook -- are already riding down the slippery slope.
  - cmsonger 9y ago
    You've hit the key point from my POV. I have a hard time having empathy for Facebook in this situation when their entire approach to user's information has been incredibly disrespectful. Constant TOS changes. Misleading privacy settings. Opt-out rather than opt-in sharing. Dark patterns designed to serve the company rather than the user ... and straight up bad ideas. I deleted my account right after they did the TOS change that Cambridge Analytica took advantage of. (The one where your friends choices would share your information. That was a transparently dumb idea from the get go.)
firstplacelast 9y ago
Wouldn't hiring people with integrity mean hiring executives that write memos that they actually agree with ? >Bosworth distanced himself from the memo, saying in a Twitter post that he hadn’t agreed with those words even when he wrote them. That is scary as shit. That they think the leaker is the one without integrity and not the executive team. What terrible people.
- Barrin92 9y ago
  >What terrible people. The language was kind of funny to me even. Hunting down the leakers to make Facebook great again... the company sounds like the business version of the white house administration. If it's this difficult and requires this much secrecy to convince yourself that what you're doing isn't evil then maybe something is very wrong on a foundational level.
- sago 9y ago
  > he hadn’t agreed with those words even when he wrote them I'm struggling to see why anybody thinks this is a reasonable defence. There is no indication he didn't believe it. The company's behaviour is consistent with it. He only said "I didn't mean it, it was to stimulate debate", and the classic "You're missing context" (which I am not able to show, of course) after drawing negative PR. It seems very generous to me to give his recent tweet much credibility at all.
komali2 9y ago
>Wrote another: “This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.” Says the company who's very moral compass is coming into question. Nazi soldiers following orders to line up minorities in slums and shoot them, or herd them into cattle cars - loyal, yes? Moral? No. "Loyalty," in that post, to what? To Mark and the investors' bottom line, and tangentially with it the bottom line of you and your fellow employees? Loyalty to this idea of "connecting the world?" Is that really the value of Facebook? It sounds like a cargo cult.
- grzm 9y ago
  The stuff being reported around Facebook is certainly cause for serious concern. "Cult"[0] has a pretty contentious meaning which is problematic when applied to Facebook without further analysis—it can certainly be separated from issues of loyalty and morality. "Cargo cult"[1] really doesn't apply at all, at least in the context of what you're describing here. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_of_the_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_o...
  - komali2 9y ago
    Thanks, you're right. I've been using the word wrong for a while.
- mistermann 9y ago
  And how do they "connect" people? Maybe I use Facebook wrong, but I so nothing much more than vanilla posts I have no interest in from the same people day after day. There is literally nothing I know of in the platform that would cause me to spontaneously meet someone new, unlike forums, meetup.com, etc.
  - criddell 9y ago
    > And how do they "connect" people? Don't forget - corporations are people too. I think Facebook's mission might be to connect people with advertisers.
onetimemanytime 9y ago
Leakers are a HUGE problem, especially when they reveal that the emperor has no clothes. (hello Googlers and FB-ers) BUT, I've the read the memo and as I saw it, he says that getting people connected can mean that bad guys will also be connected. But that is life. Terrorist and child molesters will use a smartphone too...but
feelin_googley 9y ago
This one is my favourite: "This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty." Note how the focus is not on the morality of honouring users privacy, but on the "morality" of protecting the company. Collecting personal information about billions of people, using "questionable" practices, then selling access to it. Its a "good job". One that the commenter does not want to lose. Understood. However there are laws to protect companies against employees who leak secrets. Employees sign nondisclosure agreements. Companies can adopt no tolerance policies on leaking to the media. They can terminate employees who violate them. No employee needs to consult a moral compass; the rules are clear. Break them and there can be grave consequences. On the contrary, there are no equivalent remedies available to users whose privacy has been entrusted to Facebook. There is nothing to keep FB honest. There are no grave consequences for violations of user privacy. When there is a "leak" of users information, the user is entitled to nothing more than an impersonal apology. Relative to other businesses, one might go so far as to believe "there are no rules" in the space where FB has operated. Users (who are not the customers of FB) have no recourse; theres nowhere else they can go. Buy. In all seriousness, it is the user who must hope that every FB employee has a "moral compass". Whether FB employees can trust each other is not what the user wants to know. The user wants to know if she can trust FB's employees.
- netsharc 9y ago
  I found that part wow-worthy too. I wonder if they thought whistle-blowers or leakers like Manning or Snowden have "moral compass" and "integrity", or if they're traitors without "loyalty".
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    Funny, didn’t Zuckerberg say that “Privacy is dead”? I guess only for users of his product.
- practice9 9y ago
  Not a surprise really. Many jobs considered "good" require a person to forget about ethics. Tobacco, oil, pharma, agro, car, ads industries. Now we can also add "social web" to this list. A person willing to suspend morals in exchange of money is the one you should not trust. Especially if they cannot be held accountable for their actions. Because hell knows what ELSE they are ready to do. And they will fight to defend their source of income = "loyalty" = "protecting questionable practices" = "indulging in mafia-like behaviors".
throw2016 9y ago
Established organizations are the wrong place to effect change by employees. They are not democratic, they may love to give the impression to employees and the media but there is always a hierarchy and a powerful inner group that makes the decisions. Debate is ok but anything real that threatens the powerbase will be quickly dispatched. The only person who can change Facebook is Zuckerburg and his inner cotorie or strict regulation. But this is not a problem limited to Facebook. Google is worse and there are others like Palantir and a pipeline of companies who would like to take their place. Ethical behavior from individuals will only have an effect in smaller companies and early startups. When they do not get engineers who agree to unethical practices and when there is pushback they quickly realise they may need to rethink. But software folks have postured on freedom and liberty endlessly but gone ahead and build some of the creepiest stalking infrastructure ever built without a care for fundamental human values or ethics and thus are not trusted anymore.
marco_salvatori 9y ago
The employee reaction is natural. They feel their privacy has been violated
feelin_googley 9y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-valley-internal-work-spying-surveillance-leakers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
intended 9y ago
No? People with integrity have done this all the time, people with integrity are standing up and bringing these issues up constantly. But frankly normal people cant be arsed to give up free services like google and facebook because they dont, cant, and wont afford the costs of those services at full. Further - I am a dyed in the wool non facebook user who was warning about this from the day it was created. But Facebook employees are correct in what they say. They genuinely believe that they must be a force for good, and that their websites will bring people together. It is the MOST essential thing for these people to be able to talk to each other candidly and clearly while they still believe in doing good and being ethical. Because once that goes, the ability to say uncomfortable things, the only other option is to become the corporate behemoths that all SV-ites hate. To become a suit. I can't understand how people on HN are missing this. Facebook has been regularly an enabler - but for all those years HN has been cool with it. Now, when the shoe has dropped, people here are displaying the same overreach and lack of nuance that created this scenario in the first place. Facebook is the least of all evils. People are ALWAYS going to create this miserable form of social networking because its easier and matches human neuro patterns closely enough. But this is the one time we will have a single institution which is not yet culturally made up of suits, who can institute or make the effort to fail correctly. Facebook internally discussing this and realizing that there is no hope is more critical than people tearing facebook down. Having a clear idea of objective reality, of being able to see our actual options as both employees at facebook, and as users of facebook (or friends with facebookers), is our best way forward.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

Most companies have held internal memos like this as private to the organization. Any breach of that is a firing offense. FB, Google, Apple, etc. are not doing anything that corporate America hasn't been doing for ... for I don't know how long. It is disconcerting how FB employees have come out in support of these ideas from the memo, though.

marricks 9y ago
I think big tech has it very different, given how much they know about their personal employees lives. Some information should leak within a healthy society so backlash and corrections can occur before an election might be compromised by a horrific breach. For a view on what's different an excerpt from a Guardian piece is below. --- “It’s horrifying how much they know,” he told the Guardian, on the condition of anonymity. “You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care about things’. But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police.” The public image of Silicon Valley’s tech giants is all colourful bicycles, ping-pong tables, beanbags and free food, but behind the cartoonish facade is a ruthless code of secrecy. They rely on a combination of Kool-Aid, digital and physical surveillance, legal threats and restricted stock units to prevent and detect intellectual property theft and other criminal activity. However, those same tools are also used to catch employees and contractors who talk publicly, even if it’s about their working conditions, misconduct or cultural challenges within the company. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-valley-internal-work-spying-surveillance-leakers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
- amarkov 9y ago
  One of the important qualities of a great place to work is that decisions are made based on sober analysis rather than reflexive corrections. Maybe you're right, and Facebook is just too important to allow that, but I think it's fair for Facebook employees to be unhappy about this.
  - marricks 9y ago
    Do you honestly believe you can’t have both? I’m not saying all data should be public, what I am saying is if what you’re discussing is morally repugnant given your past history it shouldn’t surprise you if it gets leaked.
    - amarkov 9y ago
      The problem is that lots of people find lots of different things morally repugnant. If it's normalized for people to leak things that they consider morally repugnant, that means there are serious costs to engaging in any controversial discussion. There's no way I'm going to talk about diversity at my company if I think someone might go tell a reporter what I said; there's no viewpoint on the issue which isn't offensive to someone.
- hinkley 9y ago
  I think we’ve all blocked out the scary part of Pinocchio, where the boys go to the carnival (Pleasure Island). Spoilers: it ends with them being treated as literal livestock.

734786710934 9y ago

What did leaking this memo actually accomplish? If you are someone who wants tech companies to be accountable for their impact on society you should welcome these internal conversations. All that the leak will do is make them less likely.

Analemma_ 9y ago
There is the "WikiLeaks justification": leaking this memo will force Facebook to have more vigorous internal controls for locking down information, making them less efficient and hastening their downfall.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
marricks 9y ago
Conversations where bosses tell their employees we should connect more people and grow the network no matter the cost? You're right we should have conversations about this, but publicly. Facebook surrendered it's right to discuss such things privately when it's willfully kept lax policies on sharing users data. Stuff like this should leak earlier so we can talk about it before, rather than after, awful things happen.
- hype7 9y ago
  I’m far from the biggest fan of Facebook, but I’m absolutely a fan of playing devils advocate in an organization if for no other reason than to solicit reactions and get people engaged. As someone who will use this device sparingly when appropriate, that’s really what this post looked like to me (as opposed to someone who was in it to get terrorists signed up to fb... really?). I honestly feel sorry for the guy
  - thisiszilff 9y ago
    On the other hand, have we really gotten to the point where we have to try to provoke others into a debate? Why can't we state what we mean, what we think, what we're uncertain about, what questions we'd like to discuss in order to foster discussion instead of provoking it. Playing devil's advocate is fine when it's understood what's going on and why you're playing devil's advocate, but when there's ambiguity you play this game of "yes I said that I didn't mean it though" which ends up sounding weak as it does in those case. Devil's advocate is a great cognitive strategy for exploring an issue together, but it's a very poor conversational strategy.

kd5bjo 9y ago

I was a Facebook employee for several years; I left shortly before this memo was drafted. The environment was pretty much the opposite of "don't rock the boat." Dissenting opinions were encouraged and openly discussed, but everyone understood that could only happen if it didn't undermine the PR department's job. Boz fostered this culture by example, publishing internal memos critical of the company. In this case, questioning whether the company's driving mission was the universal good that leadership thought it was when it was adopted. Having such high-profile dissent in circulation gives more cover to individual contributors with a gripe than any amount of policy language would.

marricks 9y ago
Please don't try and spin the term "don't rock the boat." A company that brutally cracks down on leakers and has employees en masse calling them "people without integrity" is the epitome of that mentality. It's great they feel they created a microcosm of openness within the company, but that doesn't seem to have made it act any more morally when it comes to protecting user privacy.
- amag 9y ago
  Scary, it seems like they use Newspeak internally.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"Boz fostered this culture by example, publishing internal memos critical of the company. " I read his memo titled "The Ugly." There was nothing in there that was critical of "the company." The only criticality I read was this individual being critical of people who might be prone to self-reflection. Judging from the memo and other employees characterizations of him "Boz" just sounds like a total asshole.
- skybrian 9y ago
  Yes, it does seem like it. However, I would leave the door open a crack for irony. This is hard to judge out of context, but he has to have anticipated (encouraged?) pushback.

sambull 9y ago

The data driven espionage companies should be neutered. Ad's are a joke, that's not how they make their monies.

walshemj 9y ago

Be careful what you ask for FB'ers if fb etc get considered CNI your probley going to have to have security clearance if you access to sensitive data - which is going to suck even more so if your origionaly from outside of the states. I know that some Team leaders at one Uk telco I worked at where asked to go through DV clearance - That's TS (drug tests polygraph) in USA terms.

skybrian 9y ago

I don't know about Facebook in particular, but what you're missing is that the reason employees can debate internally about policy is that they trust it won't leak externally. The risk of leaks eventually results in companies clamping down on security, so most employees aren't told anything that's not already public, unless they need it for their job. (Much like Apple has been all along, where employees only know what they need to know.) So I would ask you where you'd rather work? At an employer that trusts you not to leak stuff, or somewhere that doesn't trust you? If it's the latter, you might as well be a contractor. You'll find this is true in most organizations, not just companies. They want to know if they can trust you with their secrets. It does require some faith that internal debate will help the organization make good decisions most of the time, which admittedly can be a stretch sometimes.

marricks 9y ago
How about a company where decisions are shared internally and employees feel empowered enough to speak up, *externally if needed, against what they see as an injustice when internally nothing is done? That shouldn't be too much to ask for. Perhaps some tech unions are needed to enforce this, as shareholders and owners would probably rather have just the dichotomy you presented. This just reveals how big the power imbalance is between employees and executives that we’d have to make such decisions.
- skybrian 9y ago
  When you say speak up, do you mean internally or externally?
  - marricks 9y ago
    I thought it’d be clear but I added clarification. Speaking up internally when you’re not on the board often doesn’t get much done. At least if it’s a moral objection.
    - skybrian 9y ago

bad_user 9y ago

Arguing that internal company discussions should be all public is like arguing that people should have no privacy. That's a slippery slope. For example, how would you feel if you told your spouse about the grudges you have with your friends or work colleagues, then (s)he goes out and tells on you? That wouldn't be a very happy marriage imo. In society people that spread gossip are marginalized by those that hate gossip, because we have private affairs that we'd like to keep private. It's a natural phenomenon. And yes, I see the irony of defending Facebook by invoking privacy. I try not to have double standards.

c5karl 9y ago
This is a company that wants to be the default medium for private communications among friends and loved ones, yet deliberately makes security settings opaque and actively encourages oversharing. Anyone who doesn't see that analogy -- especially those employed at Facebook -- are already riding down the slippery slope.
- cmsonger 9y ago
  You've hit the key point from my POV. I have a hard time having empathy for Facebook in this situation when their entire approach to user's information has been incredibly disrespectful. Constant TOS changes. Misleading privacy settings. Opt-out rather than opt-in sharing. Dark patterns designed to serve the company rather than the user ... and straight up bad ideas. I deleted my account right after they did the TOS change that Cambridge Analytica took advantage of. (The one where your friends choices would share your information. That was a transparently dumb idea from the get go.)

firstplacelast 9y ago

Wouldn't hiring people with integrity mean hiring executives that write memos that they actually agree with ? >Bosworth distanced himself from the memo, saying in a Twitter post that he hadn’t agreed with those words even when he wrote them. That is scary as shit. That they think the leaker is the one without integrity and not the executive team. What terrible people.

Barrin92 9y ago
>What terrible people. The language was kind of funny to me even. Hunting down the leakers to make Facebook great again... the company sounds like the business version of the white house administration. If it's this difficult and requires this much secrecy to convince yourself that what you're doing isn't evil then maybe something is very wrong on a foundational level.
sago 9y ago
> he hadn’t agreed with those words even when he wrote them I'm struggling to see why anybody thinks this is a reasonable defence. There is no indication he didn't believe it. The company's behaviour is consistent with it. He only said "I didn't mean it, it was to stimulate debate", and the classic "You're missing context" (which I am not able to show, of course) after drawing negative PR. It seems very generous to me to give his recent tweet much credibility at all.

komali2 9y ago

>Wrote another: “This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.” Says the company who's very moral compass is coming into question. Nazi soldiers following orders to line up minorities in slums and shoot them, or herd them into cattle cars - loyal, yes? Moral? No. "Loyalty," in that post, to what? To Mark and the investors' bottom line, and tangentially with it the bottom line of you and your fellow employees? Loyalty to this idea of "connecting the world?" Is that really the value of Facebook? It sounds like a cargo cult.

grzm 9y ago
The stuff being reported around Facebook is certainly cause for serious concern. "Cult"[0] has a pretty contentious meaning which is problematic when applied to Facebook without further analysis—it can certainly be separated from issues of loyalty and morality. "Cargo cult"[1] really doesn't apply at all, at least in the context of what you're describing here. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_of_the_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_o...
- komali2 9y ago
  Thanks, you're right. I've been using the word wrong for a while.
mistermann 9y ago
And how do they "connect" people? Maybe I use Facebook wrong, but I so nothing much more than vanilla posts I have no interest in from the same people day after day. There is literally nothing I know of in the platform that would cause me to spontaneously meet someone new, unlike forums, meetup.com, etc.
- criddell 9y ago
  > And how do they "connect" people? Don't forget - corporations are people too. I think Facebook's mission might be to connect people with advertisers.

onetimemanytime 9y ago

Leakers are a HUGE problem, especially when they reveal that the emperor has no clothes. (hello Googlers and FB-ers) BUT, I've the read the memo and as I saw it, he says that getting people connected can mean that bad guys will also be connected. But that is life. Terrorist and child molesters will use a smartphone too...but

feelin_googley 9y ago

This one is my favourite: "This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty." Note how the focus is not on the morality of honouring users privacy, but on the "morality" of protecting the company. Collecting personal information about billions of people, using "questionable" practices, then selling access to it. Its a "good job". One that the commenter does not want to lose. Understood. However there are laws to protect companies against employees who leak secrets. Employees sign nondisclosure agreements. Companies can adopt no tolerance policies on leaking to the media. They can terminate employees who violate them. No employee needs to consult a moral compass; the rules are clear. Break them and there can be grave consequences. On the contrary, there are no equivalent remedies available to users whose privacy has been entrusted to Facebook. There is nothing to keep FB honest. There are no grave consequences for violations of user privacy. When there is a "leak" of users information, the user is entitled to nothing more than an impersonal apology. Relative to other businesses, one might go so far as to believe "there are no rules" in the space where FB has operated. Users (who are not the customers of FB) have no recourse; theres nowhere else they can go. Buy. In all seriousness, it is the user who must hope that every FB employee has a "moral compass". Whether FB employees can trust each other is not what the user wants to know. The user wants to know if she can trust FB's employees.

netsharc 9y ago
I found that part wow-worthy too. I wonder if they thought whistle-blowers or leakers like Manning or Snowden have "moral compass" and "integrity", or if they're traitors without "loyalty".
- chris_wot 9y ago
  Funny, didn’t Zuckerberg say that “Privacy is dead”? I guess only for users of his product.
practice9 9y ago
Not a surprise really. Many jobs considered "good" require a person to forget about ethics. Tobacco, oil, pharma, agro, car, ads industries. Now we can also add "social web" to this list. A person willing to suspend morals in exchange of money is the one you should not trust. Especially if they cannot be held accountable for their actions. Because hell knows what ELSE they are ready to do. And they will fight to defend their source of income = "loyalty" = "protecting questionable practices" = "indulging in mafia-like behaviors".

throw2016 9y ago

Established organizations are the wrong place to effect change by employees. They are not democratic, they may love to give the impression to employees and the media but there is always a hierarchy and a powerful inner group that makes the decisions. Debate is ok but anything real that threatens the powerbase will be quickly dispatched. The only person who can change Facebook is Zuckerburg and his inner cotorie or strict regulation. But this is not a problem limited to Facebook. Google is worse and there are others like Palantir and a pipeline of companies who would like to take their place. Ethical behavior from individuals will only have an effect in smaller companies and early startups. When they do not get engineers who agree to unethical practices and when there is pushback they quickly realise they may need to rethink. But software folks have postured on freedom and liberty endlessly but gone ahead and build some of the creepiest stalking infrastructure ever built without a care for fundamental human values or ethics and thus are not trusted anymore.

marco_salvatori 9y ago

The employee reaction is natural. They feel their privacy has been violated

feelin_googley 9y ago

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-valley-internal-work-spying-surveillance-leakers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...

intended 9y ago

No? People with integrity have done this all the time, people with integrity are standing up and bringing these issues up constantly. But frankly normal people cant be arsed to give up free services like google and facebook because they dont, cant, and wont afford the costs of those services at full. Further - I am a dyed in the wool non facebook user who was warning about this from the day it was created. But Facebook employees are correct in what they say. They genuinely believe that they must be a force for good, and that their websites will bring people together. It is the MOST essential thing for these people to be able to talk to each other candidly and clearly while they still believe in doing good and being ethical. Because once that goes, the ability to say uncomfortable things, the only other option is to become the corporate behemoths that all SV-ites hate. To become a suit. I can't understand how people on HN are missing this. Facebook has been regularly an enabler - but for all those years HN has been cool with it. Now, when the shoe has dropped, people here are displaying the same overreach and lack of nuance that created this scenario in the first place. Facebook is the least of all evils. People are ALWAYS going to create this miserable form of social networking because its easier and matches human neuro patterns closely enough. But this is the one time we will have a single institution which is not yet culturally made up of suits, who can institute or make the effort to fail correctly. Facebook internally discussing this and realizing that there is no hope is more critical than people tearing facebook down. Having a clear idea of objective reality, of being able to see our actual options as both employees at facebook, and as users of facebook (or friends with facebookers), is our best way forward.