6 ms·

There's a paragraph here where they talk about reviewing private messenger conversations between interns after they didn't show up for work one day. That feels

There's a paragraph here where they talk about reviewing private messenger conversations between interns after they didn't show up for work one day. That feels pretty invasive. Facebook tried to couch it in "genuine concern" for their safety. I'm not sure that holds water with anyone who's familiar with the workplace culture inside Facebook.

bertil 8y ago
On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. At least, that was the case when I was there, I can’t think it has changed. I’m assuming this has to do with a lot of well documented legal reasons (insider trading, sexual harassment, etc.) De facto, hardly any conversation goes through email: salary, pension, that kind of things almost exclusively. Project progress, being cancelled, blockers, all that goes through an internal version of Facebook (now Workplace, when I was there, a subset of the main Facebook). It made sense that all that is deemed work product for the company. I would be more surprised if they had access to conversation with outsiders. On the “genuine concern”, I joined several months after Snowden’s revelations. The security team was (and I’m assuming still is) very aware that State agents might try to access employee credentials. Overall, the company is very considerate for employees, typically no matter the cost (e.g. the freezing eggs things) and quite conscious to respect boundaries--but I would expect that a small chance that a hostile Nation state escalated to kidnapping employees is a stretch but not a big one. I’m a little surprised because the company prides itself on not judging, and actually doesn’t care much about time spent in the office. Interns might be given a shorter lead there. With E2E encryption introduced to Messenger since a lot of that could have changed.
- chuckgreenman 8y ago
  Interesting, I guess I assumed there would be some sort of internal Slack like application for work related communications. The article (or atleast my reading of it) made it seem like these were straight up standard fb messenger chats.
- clubm8 8y ago
  >On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. Were they limiting themselves to the internal tools? I got the impression they could have used personal FB accounts.
  - hirsin 8y ago
    Hearsay from folks I know at FB - you use your personal account at work. There's no work account/personal account split.
    - patja 8y ago
      That would be consistent with everything I've seen from them as a developer. One of the most common recurring requests on the Facebook Developers Facebook Group is when someone has all of their privileges for app development on the FB API revoked because Facebook found they were using a second "company account" or "developer account" for managing their app. Facebook sees those as "fake accounts" which are prohibited under their policy/TOS. You get only one account for anything personal or business-related, and doing otherwise risks having everything thrown into the black hole of "everything has been revoked, and no human will tell me why or how to fix it"
      - metildaa 8y ago
        This seems insane, how is a large company that has any sort of employee churn supposed to maintain something on Facebook? Your inevitably chasing former employees to get access to stuff your company built for the platform...
        Shish2k 8y ago
        The idea is that you don't link your company stuff to an individual user account with a single username/password that gets shared - you link your company stuff to a Page, and list multiple people with their own accounts as Page admins
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. At least, that was the case when I was there, I can’t think it has changed. Do Facebook employees have separate Facebook accounts for work? My impression was that they don't, but I could be wrong. If they're forced to use their "personal" account for work-related functions, I think that raises all kinds of privacy concerns that probably should negate the principle that employer ownership authorizes monitoring.
  - rock_hard 8y ago
    They do need a FB account to access all internal systems, but that can be a seperate account from their private one
    - CharlesColeman 8y ago
      > They do need a FB account to access all internal systems, but that can be a seperate account from their private one Is there an exception in the TOS for that? It's my understanding that they forbid regular users from creating multiple accounts, though enforcement of the rules is pretty ineffective. https://www.facebook.com/help/975828035803295?helpref=uf_permalink https://www.facebook.com/help/975828035803295?helpref=uf_per...
      - rock_hard 8y ago
        Employee's != regular users
      - creato 8y ago
        I doubt it's multiple accounts on the exact same service. I'm guessing fb.com is a near-clone of facebook.com's codebase, personal accounts are facebook.com accounts, and work accounts are fb.com accounts.
        8y ago
sexmachinebot 8y ago
And here we go again, do you feel surprised that Slack admin can read all private slack messages sent between the members? When will Facebook bashing stop. It's well within FB right to read their employees evil scheming tricks.
- chuckgreenman 8y ago
  Learn to read mate, I was clearly referring to facebook messenger chats, a product, while used for work at Facebook is used privately by the vast majority of folks.

bertil 8y ago

On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. At least, that was the case when I was there, I can’t think it has changed. I’m assuming this has to do with a lot of well documented legal reasons (insider trading, sexual harassment, etc.) De facto, hardly any conversation goes through email: salary, pension, that kind of things almost exclusively. Project progress, being cancelled, blockers, all that goes through an internal version of Facebook (now Workplace, when I was there, a subset of the main Facebook). It made sense that all that is deemed work product for the company. I would be more surprised if they had access to conversation with outsiders. On the “genuine concern”, I joined several months after Snowden’s revelations. The security team was (and I’m assuming still is) very aware that State agents might try to access employee credentials. Overall, the company is very considerate for employees, typically no matter the cost (e.g. the freezing eggs things) and quite conscious to respect boundaries--but I would expect that a small chance that a hostile Nation state escalated to kidnapping employees is a stretch but not a big one. I’m a little surprised because the company prides itself on not judging, and actually doesn’t care much about time spent in the office. Interns might be given a shorter lead there. With E2E encryption introduced to Messenger since a lot of that could have changed.

chuckgreenman 8y ago
Interesting, I guess I assumed there would be some sort of internal Slack like application for work related communications. The article (or atleast my reading of it) made it seem like these were straight up standard fb messenger chats.
clubm8 8y ago
>On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. Were they limiting themselves to the internal tools? I got the impression they could have used personal FB accounts.
- hirsin 8y ago
  Hearsay from folks I know at FB - you use your personal account at work. There's no work account/personal account split.
  - patja 8y ago
    That would be consistent with everything I've seen from them as a developer. One of the most common recurring requests on the Facebook Developers Facebook Group is when someone has all of their privileges for app development on the FB API revoked because Facebook found they were using a second "company account" or "developer account" for managing their app. Facebook sees those as "fake accounts" which are prohibited under their policy/TOS. You get only one account for anything personal or business-related, and doing otherwise risks having everything thrown into the black hole of "everything has been revoked, and no human will tell me why or how to fix it"
    - metildaa 8y ago
      This seems insane, how is a large company that has any sort of employee churn supposed to maintain something on Facebook? Your inevitably chasing former employees to get access to stuff your company built for the platform...
      - Shish2k 8y ago
        The idea is that you don't link your company stuff to an individual user account with a single username/password that gets shared - you link your company stuff to a Page, and list multiple people with their own accounts as Page admins
CharlesColeman 8y ago
> On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. At least, that was the case when I was there, I can’t think it has changed. Do Facebook employees have separate Facebook accounts for work? My impression was that they don't, but I could be wrong. If they're forced to use their "personal" account for work-related functions, I think that raises all kinds of privacy concerns that probably should negate the principle that employer ownership authorizes monitoring.
- rock_hard 8y ago
  They do need a FB account to access all internal systems, but that can be a seperate account from their private one
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    > They do need a FB account to access all internal systems, but that can be a seperate account from their private one Is there an exception in the TOS for that? It's my understanding that they forbid regular users from creating multiple accounts, though enforcement of the rules is pretty ineffective. https://www.facebook.com/help/975828035803295?helpref=uf_permalink https://www.facebook.com/help/975828035803295?helpref=uf_per...
    - rock_hard 8y ago
      Employee's != regular users
    - creato 8y ago
      I doubt it's multiple accounts on the exact same service. I'm guessing fb.com is a near-clone of facebook.com's codebase, personal accounts are facebook.com accounts, and work accounts are fb.com accounts.
      - 8y ago

sexmachinebot 8y ago

And here we go again, do you feel surprised that Slack admin can read all private slack messages sent between the members? When will Facebook bashing stop. It's well within FB right to read their employees evil scheming tricks.

chuckgreenman 8y ago
Learn to read mate, I was clearly referring to facebook messenger chats, a product, while used for work at Facebook is used privately by the vast majority of folks.