Is Your Privacy on Facebook a Perk?

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October 29, 2007

Is Your Privacy on Facebook a Perk?

Valleywag — Facebook employees know what profiles you look at:

“‘My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile,’ says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone’s profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you’ve been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama’s intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it’s considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.”

It might be fun to indulge in some sort of high dudgeon over this, but whom would I be kidding? How much privacy from employees themselves have you ever assumed on a system you were using? I’ve never assumed any. If there’s someone running a server I’ve got an account on, that person has total access — otherwise that person is not really “running” anything.

If I found out an admin was poking through my stuff or reading my mail, I’d demand an explanation beyond “cuz I want to and I can,” and if I didn’t like what I heard I’d complain bitterly then get my stuff off that server immediately, but that’s probably because when I’ve been in the position to poke around I simply haven’t: That would be creepy.

An anonymous Facebook employee and another anonymous ex-Facebook employee have both written in to dampen some of Valleywag’s initial upset, the current employee writing:

“Most FB employees have the same access to your profiles as everyone else and cannot see anything more than that. Only the select few have full access including those on the security staff and the higher ups.”

Which leaves me wondering if the employee who triggered the anecdote Valleywag shared is a particularly stupid nerd who thinks it’s cool to play the role of “omniscient dude” with acquaintances, or a sign of bigger cultural problems within the company vis a vis its professionalism where user privacy is concerned.

And it’s too bad everyone involved in this story is anonymous. Facebook doesn’t get the opportunity to collect that employee’s scalp brutally and publicly.

Tags: facebook, privacy, social networking