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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
by 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 agoInteresting, 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 agoHearsay from folks I know at FB - you use your personal account at work. There's no work account/personal account split.
- patja 8y agoThat 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 agoThis 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 agoThe 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
- metildaa 8y agoSounds like a great way for 1 angry employee to hijack a Facebook page.
- forgotmyhnacc 8y ago
- 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 agoThey 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...