Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee

Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee is an article by Phil Wong written for The Rumpus. It may or may not be fiction. The articled talks about the inner workings of Facebook, the company,

Some choice bits:

Rumpus: So in what other ways do you track behavior, that isn’t necessarily obvious to users?

Employee: We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth.
...
Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.

I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.

Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?

Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.

Oh Facebook. There is no quicker way to ignite the blogosphere than to juxtapose the words "facebook" and "privacy." Or maybe to write inacture details about computer science. Click through on "from" link to see what I mean about the raging discussion on metafilter.
(From Metafilter)