Facebook's impact on privacy and democracy
we face a number of important issues around privacy, safety and democracy. Facebook, we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility. And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry, told by company insiders, it's possible that we haven't been as fast as we needed to be too slow to add. I didn't see it fast. I think we were too slow and former employers, everybody was pretty upset that we had caught it during the election, our Facebook was used to disrupt democracy around the globe.
Facebook’s impact on democracy
I think Facebook.com is an online directory for colleges. But I realized that because I didn't have people's information, I needed to make it interesting enough so that people would want to use the site and want to like, put their information out. So we launched it at Harvard, and within a couple of weeks, two thirds of the school and signed up. So we're like, Alright, this is pretty sweet. Like, let's just go out. And just interesting seeing how it evolves. We have a suite office will just show us around the crib.We didn't want cubicles. So we got IKEA kitchen tables instead. I thought that kind of went along with a whole vibe here.raised some stuffers fearedhow many people were free, but it's actually 20 right now. She just shot this one. Lady, right? Pitbull. Oh, nice.I truly had the school.Were you taking fits at this point anyway. Um,I mean, there doesn't necessarily have to be more.From the early days, Mark had this vision of connecting the whole world. So if Google was about providing you access to all the information, Facebook was about connecting all the peopleto say your name and pronounce it so Nobody messes it up, and they have it on tape. Sure. It's Mark Zuckerberg. It was not crazy. Somebody was going to connect all
those people. Why not? We have our Facebook fellow. We have Mark Zuckerberg, the pleasure of introducing Mark Zuckerberg, founder of facebook.com.Yo,and Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, he was fascinated by hacker culture, this notion that software programmers could do things that would shock the world. And a lot of times people are just like too careful. I think it's more useful to like, make things happen. And then like apologize later than it is to make sure that you dot all your I's now and then like just not get stuff done. So it was a little bit of a renegade philosophy, and a disrespect for authority that led to the Facebook motto, move fast and break things. Never heard of Facebook.That's going crazy for Facebook creates its own world that you get sucked into started adding things like status updates and photos and groups and apps. When we first launched we were hoping for you know, maybe 400 500 people.The first 100 million and the next 100 million.So you're motivated by what building things that change the world.And in a way that it needs to be changed. Who is brock obama? The answer is right there on my Facebook page.Those days move fast and break things didn't seem to be sociopathic, if you're building a product that people love, you can make a lot of mistakes. It wasn't that they intended to do harm so much as they were unconcerned about the possibility that harm would result. So just to be clear, you're not going to sell or share any of the information on Facebook, we're not going to share people's information, except for with the people that they've asked for it to be shared. Technology, optimism is so deeply ingrained in the value system and in the beliefs of people in Silicon Valley here for hackathons, let's get started that they've come to believe it is akin to the law of gravity that, of course, technology makes the world a better place. It always had, it always will. And that assumption,essentially masked a set of changes that were going on in the culture that werevery dangerous. From KX, Jay Z and Sacramento 27. Mark Zuckerberg quest to connect the world would bring about historic change, and far reaching consequences in politics, privacy and technology.We've been investigating warning signs that existed long before problems burst into public view.But for those inside Facebook, the story began with an intoxicating vision that turned into a lucrative business plan. While the one thing that Mark Zuckerberg has been so good at is being incredibly clear and compelling about the mission that Facebook has always had. Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share the power to share in order to make the world more open and connected, more open and connected, open and connected.how pervasive admission was that inside of the company? Give me a sense of that. It was something that, you know, Mark doesn't just say when we do you know ordered calisthenics in the morning and we yell the mission to each other. Right, we would actually say to each other, you know, when Mark wasn't around, and that was a mission that you really believed in?How could you not it? How exciting? What if connecting the world actually delivered a promise that we've been looking for, to genuinely make the world a better place?
Was there ever a point where there was questions internally about this mission being naive optimism? I think the short answer is completely Yes. And I think that's why
we loved it. Especially in a moment, like when we crossed a billion monthly active users for the first time, and marks the way I recall mark at the time.I remember thinking, I don't think Mark is going to stop until he gets to everybody.I think some of us had an early understanding that we were creating, in some ways, a digital nation state. This was the greatest experiment and free speech in human
history. There was a sense inside the company that we are building the future and there was a real focus onyouth being a good thing.It was not a particularly diverse workforce. It was very much the sort of Harvard Stanford Ivy League group of people who were largely in their 20sthat was a big believer in the company like I knew that it was going to be a paradigm shifting thing. There is this definitely this feeling of everything for the company of this you know, world staring vision, everyone more or less dressed with the same fleece and swag with logo on it. posters on the wall that looks somewhat
Orwellian. But of course, you know, in an upbeat way, obviously, and you know, some of the slogans are pretty well known, move fast and break things Fortune favors the bold. What would you do if you weren't afraid, you know, as always the sort of rousing rhetoric that would push you to to go further. Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former product manager on Facebook's advertising team is one of eight former Facebook insiders who agreed to talk on camera about their experiences. in Silicon Valley.
There's a you know, almost a mafioso code of silence, that you're not supposed to talk about the business in any but the most flattering way, right? Basically, you
can't say anything, you know, measure truthful about the business. And I think as perhaps with Facebook, it's kind of arrived at the point which is so important. It
needs to be a little more transparent about how it works. Like let's talk a little bit rate about everyone in Silicon Valley, you know, creating disrupting this and
improving the world, right. It's, in many ways a business like any other. It's just kind of more exciting and impactful.By 2007, Zuckerberg had made it clear that the goal of the business was worldwide expansion.Almost a year ago, when we were first discussing how to let everyone in the world into Facebook. I remember someone said to me, Mark, we already have nearly every
college student in the us on Facebook.It's incredible that we were even able to do that. But no one gets a second trick like that. Well, let's take a look at how we did.What was the growth team about what did you do at growth, the story of growth has really been about making Facebook available to people that wanted it but couldn't
have access to it. Facebook's second longest serving employee is one of five officials, the company put forward to talk to frontline. She was an original
member of the growth team. One of my first projects was expanding Facebook to high school students, I worked on translating Facebook into over 100 languages. there were 1 million users. And now there's over 2 billion people using Facebook every month, some of the problems that have reared their head with Facebook
over the past couple of years, seem to have been caused, in some ways by this exponential growth. So I think Mark and Mark has said this, that we have been slow to
really understand the ways in which Facebook might be used for bad things. And we've been really focused on the good things. So who are all these new users, the growth
team had tons of engineers figuring out how you could make the new user experience more engaging, how you could figure out how to get more people to sign up, everyone
was focused on growth, growth, growth, people the power to share. And the key to keeping all these new people engaged or open and connected was Facebook's most important feature newsfeed newsfeed, the seemingly endless stream of stories, pictures and updates, shared by friends, advertisers, and others, it analyzes all the
information available to each user, it actually computes what's going to be the most interesting piece of information and publishes a little story for them. It's your
personalized newspaper, it's your The New York Times review channel, you it is you know, your customized optimized vision on the world. But what appeared in user's
newsfeed wasn't random. It was driven by a secret mathematical formula, an algorithm, the stories are ranked in terms of what's going to be the most important and we
designed a lot of algorithms so we can produce interesting content for you. The goal the news feed is to provide you the user with the content on Facebook that you
most want to see. It is designed to make you want to keep scrolling, keep looking, keep liking, that's the key. That's the secret sauce. That's how we that's why we're
worth x billion dollars. The addition of the new like button in 2009 allowed newsfeed to collect vast amounts of users personal data that would prove invaluable to
Facebook. At the time, we were a little bit skeptical about like button, we were concerned. And as it turned out, our intuition was just dead wrong. And what we found
is that the like button acted as a social lubricant. And of course, it was also driving this flywheel of engagement, that people felt like they were heard on the
platform, whenever they shared something, connect to it by liking it, and and became a driving force for the product, it was incredibly important because it allowed us
to understand who are the people that you care more about that cause you to react, and who are the businesses, the pages, the other interests on Facebook that are
important to you. And that gave us a degree of constantly increasing understanding about people. newsfeed got off to a bit of a rocky start. And now our users love
newsfeed. They love it.news feeds exponential growth was spurred on by the fact that existing laws didn't hold internet companies liable for all the content being posted on their sites. So
section 230 of the communications decency act is the provision which allows the internet economy to grow and thrive. And Facebook is one of the principal beneficiaries
of this provision. It says, Don't hold this internet company responsible if some idiot says something violent on the site. Don't hold the internet company responsible
if somebody publishes something that creates conflict. that violates the law. It's the quintessential provision that allows them to say, don't blame us. So it was up
to Facebook to make the rules. Not inside the company. They made a fateful decision. We took a very libertarian perspective here, we allowed people to speak. And we
said if you're going to incite violence, that's clearly out of bounds. We're going to kick you off immediately. But we're gonna allow people to go right up to the
edge. And we're gonna allow other people to respond. We had to set up some ground rules, basic decency, no nudity, and no violent or hateful speech. And after that, we
felt some reluctance to interpose our value system on this worldwide community that was growing, was there not a concern then that it could come become sort of a place
of just utter confusionThat you have lies that are given the same weight as truths, and that it kind of just becomes a place where truth becomes completely obfuscated. Now, we relied on what
we thought were the public's common sense and common decency to police the site.That approach would soon contribute to real world consequences. Far from Silicon Valley,where Mark Zuckerberg optimistic vision, at first seemed to be playing outthe Arab Spring, I'd come to Egypt.It took hold with the help of a Facebook page protesting abuses by the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Not that I was thinking that this Facebook page was going to be
effective, I just did not want to look back and say that happened. And I just didn't do anything about at the time, while going in was working for Google in the Middle
East. In just three days, and over 100,000 people joined the page.Throughout the next few months, the page was growing until what happened in Tunisia, Tunisia have captured the attention of viewers around the world. And a lot of it
was happening online, it took just 28 days to the fall of the regime. It just created for me a moment of, maybe we can do this.And I just posted an event, calling for a revolution in 10 days, like we should all get to the street and we should all bring down Mubarak,organized by a group of online activists according to the Facebook revolution.Within days, guns online cry had helped fill the streets of Cairo, with hundreds of 1000s of protesters.18 days later,President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down.It's generally acknowledged that Facebook.com page first sparked the protests, there was a moment that you were being interviewed on CNN, yeah, I remember that first
Tunisia now Egypt, what's next? at Facebook. That's whatfacebook, facebook, the technology was, for me the enabler, I would not have been able to engage with others, I would not have been able to propagate my ideas to
others without social media without Facebook, giving Facebook a lot of credit for this. Yeah, for sure. Mark Zuckerberg one day, and thank him, actually,hey, you ever think that this could have an impact on revolution, you know, my own opinion is that it would be extremely arrogant for any specific technology company
to claim any meaningful role in those. But I do think that the overall trend that's at play here, which is people being able to share what they want with the people
who they want is an extremely powerful thing right in it. And we're kind of fundamentally rewiring the world from the ground up. And it starts with people, they were
relatively restrained externally about taking credit for it. But internally, they were, I would say, very happy to take credit for the idea that social media is being
used to affect democratic change activists and civil society leaders would just come up to me and say, you know, wow, we couldn't have done this without you guys.
Government officials, you know, would say, Does Facebook really realize how much you guys are changing our societies, it felt like Facebook had extraordinary power,
and power for good.But one Facebook was enjoying its moment.Back in Egypt, on the ground and on Facebook, the situation was unraveling. Follow following the revolution, things going into a much worse direction than what we have
anticipated. There's a complete split between the civil community and those who are calling for an Islamic State. What was happening in Egypt was polarization that the
clashes between Christians and the military police brotherhood cannot rule this country and all these voices started to clash and the environment on social media
breeded that kind of clash like that polarization rewarded it.When the Arab Spring happened, I know that a lot of people in Silicon Valley thought our technologies help bring freedom to people, which was true, but there's a twist
to this, which is Facebook's newsfeed algorithm.If you increase the tone of your posts against your opponentsWe're gonna get more distribution.Because we tend to be more tribal. So if I call my opponents names, my tribe is happy and celebrating. Yes, do it like, comment share, so more people end up seeing it,
because the algorithm is gonna say, oh, okay, that's engaging content, people like it, show it to more people. Also, other groups have the pattern of sectarian
violence. The hardest part for me was seeing the tool that brought us together tearing us apart. These tools are just enablers for whomever they, they don't separate
between what's good and bad. They just look at engagement metrics. Your name himself became a victim of those metrics. There was a page it had like hundreds of 1000s
of followers all what it did was creating fake statements. And I was a victim of that page.They wrote statements about me insulting the army, which puts me as serious risk because that is not something I said, I was extremely naive, in a way I don't like
actually now thinking that these are liberating tools.It's the spread of misinformation, fake news, in Egypt in 2011. He says he later talked to people he knew at Facebook and other companies about what was going on, I
tried to talk to people who are in Silicon Valley, but I feel like it was not it was not being heard, what were you trying to express to people in Silicon Valley, it's
very serious, whatever that way that you are building has massive, serious intent in unintended consequences on the lives of people on this planet. And you are not
investing enough in trying to make sure that what you are building does not go in the wrong way. And it's very hard to be in their position, no matter how they try and
move and change things. There will be always unintended consequences. activists in my region were on the front lines of, you know, spotting corners of Facebook that
the rest of the world the rest of the company wasn't yet talking about. Because in a company that's built off numbers and metrics and measurements, anecdotes sometimes
got lost along the way. And that was always a real challenge and and always bothered me. Elizabeth Linder, Facebook's representative in the region at the time, was
also hearing warnings from government officials. So many country representatives were expressing to me a huge concern about the ability of rumors to spread on
Facebook, and what do you do about that? How did you respond to that tweet when we didn't have a solution for it? And so the best that I could do is report back to
headquarters that this is something that I was hearing on the ground, and what sort of response would you get from headquarters? You know, I, it's impossible to be
specific about that. Because it was always just kind of this is what I'm hearing this is what's going on. But I think in a in a company where the the the people that
could have actually, you know, had an impact on making those decisions or not necessarily seen it firsthand. I think everything that happened after the Arab Spring
should have been a warning sign to Facebook Zeynep tufekci, a researcher and former computer programmer had also been raising alarms to Facebook and other social media
companies. These companies were terribly understaffed, in over their heads in terms of the important role they were playing. Like, all of a sudden, you're the public
sphere in Egypt. So I kept starting to talk to my friends at these companies and saying, you have to step up. And you have to put in large amounts of people who speak
the language, who understand the culture, who understand the complexities of wherever you happen to operate. But Facebook hadn't been set up to police the amount of
content coming from all the new places it was expanding to, I think, no one had any of these companies in Silicon Valley has the resources for this kind of scale.But you had queues of work for people to go through and hundreds of employees who would spend all day every day clicking Yes, no keep takedown takedown, takedown, keep
up, keep up making judgment calls, snap judgment calls about does it violate our terms of service? Does it violate our standards of decency? What are the consequences
of the speech? So you have these fabulously talented group of mostly 20 somethings who are deciding what speech matters, and they're doing it in real time? all day
every day? Is that scary? It's terrifying. Right? their responsibility was awesome.
Facebook’s impact on privacy
couldn't ever have predicted how fast Facebook would grow the trajectory of growth of the user base. And of the issues was like this and of all, all staffing throughout the company was like this. The company was trying to make money. It was trying to keep costs down. It had to be a going concern, it had to be a revenue
generating thing, or would cease to exist. In fact, Facebook was preparing to take its rapidly growing business to the next level by going public. I'm David E.
bergemann. Facebook CFO, thank you for taking the time to consider an investment in Facebook. Social media giant hopes to raise $5 billion. The pressure heading into
the IPO, of course was to prove that Facebook was a great business, otherwise, we'd have no shareholders. Facebook, is it worth $100 billion, and should it be valued
at Zuckerberg challenge was to show investors and advertisers the profit that could be made from Facebook's most valuable asset. The personal data it had on its users
mark, great as he was at vision and product. He had very little experience in building a big advertising business. That would be the job of Zuckerberg, Deputy Sheryl
Sandberg, who have done the same for Google. at Facebook, we have a broad mission, we want to make the world more open and connected.The business model we see today was created by Sheryl Sandberg and the team she built at Facebook, many of whom had been with her at Google publicly. Sandberg and
Zuckerberg had been downplaying the extent of the personal data, Facebook was collecting and emphasizing users privacy, we are focused on privacy, we care the most
about privacy, our business model is by far the most privacy friendly to consumers. That's our mission, right? And we have to do that. Because if people feel like they
don't have control over how they're sharing things, then then we're failing them really is the point that the only things Facebook knows about you or things you've
done and told us internally, Sandberg would soon lead Facebook in a very different direction. There's a meeting I think, was in March of 2012, in which you know, it
was everyone who built stuff inside ads, myself among them. And you know, she basically recited the reality, which is revenue was flattening. It wasn't slow isn't
declining, but it wasn't growing nearly as fast as investors would have guessed. So she basically said, like, we have to do something, you people have to do something.
And so there was a big effort to basically pull out all the stops and start experimenting way more aggressively.The reality is that, yeah, Facebook has a lot of personal data, your chat with your girlfriend, a boyfriend, you're drunk party photos from college, etc. The reality
is that none of that is actually valuable to any marketer. They want commercially interesting data. You know, what products Did you take off the shelf at Best Buy?
What did you buy in your last grocery run didn't include diapers? Do you have kids or your head of household? Right? It's things like that things that exist in the
outside world that just do not exist inside Facebook at all. Sandberg teams started developing new ways to collect personal data from users wherever they went on the
internet. And when they weren't on the Internet at all. And so there's this extraordinary thing that happens that doesn't get much attention. At the time.About four or five months before the IPO, the company announces its first relationship with Data Broker companies, companies that most Americans aren't at all aware
of, that go out and buy up data about each and every one of us, hopefully, by where we shop, where we live, what our traffic patterns are, what our families are doing,
what our likes are, what magazines, we read data that the consumer doesn't even know that's being collected about them because it's being collected from the rest of their lives by companies they don't know. And it's now being shared with Facebook so that Facebook can target ads back to the user.What Facebook does, is profile you, if you're on Facebook, it's collecting everything you do. If you're on Facebook, it's using tracking pixels to collect what you're
browsing. And for us micro targeting to work for its business model to work, it has to remain a surveillance machine. They made a product thatwas a better tool for advertisers than anything that had ever come before it. And of course, the ad revenue spikes. That change alone,I think is a sea change in the way that company felt about its futureand the direction it was headed.Sparrow Pani was so uncomfortable with the direction Facebook was going. He left before the company's work with data brokers took effect.The extent of Facebook's data collection was largely a secret until a law student in Austria had a chance encounter with a company lawyer.I kind of wanted a semester off so I actually went to California toSanta Clara University in the Silicon Valley,someone from Facebook was a guest speaker explaining to us basically how they deal with European privacy laws.And a general understanding was you can do whatever you want to do in Europe, because they do have data protection laws, but they don't really enforce them at all.So I send an email to Facebook saying, I want to have a copy of all my data.So I got from Facebook, about 1200 pages, and I read through it.In my personal file, I think the most sensitive information was my messages. For example, a friend of mine was in the closed unit off the off of psychological Hospital in in Vienna.
deleted all these messages. But all of them came back up. And you have messages about your love life and sexuality. And all of that is kept.Facebook tries to give you the impression that you shared is only with friends, the realities, Facebook is always looking, there is a data category called last location where they store way they think you've been the last time if you tag people in pictures, there's GPS location. So by that they know which person has been at what place at what time back on the server stairs like a treasure trove just like 10 times as big as anything we ever see on the screen. As Facebook was ramping up its data collection business ahead of the IPOtrends filed 22 complaints with the data protection commission in Ireland, where Facebook has its international headquarters. And they had 20 people at a time over a little supermarket in a small town. It's called portarlington. It's 5000 people in the middle of nowhere. And they were meant to regulate Google or Facebook or
LinkedIn and all of them trems claimed Facebook was violating European privacy law in the way it was collecting personal data, and not telling users what they were doing with it. And after we found these complaints, that was when actually Facebook reached out basically saying, oh, let's sit down and have a coffee and talk about
all of this.So we actually had all kind of notable meeting that was in 2012, and the uppers in Vienna.But the interesting thing is that most of these points simply didn't have an answer. You told me saw that their pens were down. However, at a certain point, I just got a text message from the Data Protection Authority saying they're not available to speak to me anymore. That was how this procedure basically ended. Facebook knew that
the system plays in their favor. So even if you violate the law, the reality is it's it's very likely not gonna be enforced.Facebook disputed terms is claims and said it takes European privacy laws seriously. It agreed to make its policies clearer, and stop storing some kinds of user data.
So without further ado, my second birthin Silicon Valley, those who covered the tech industry had also been confronting Facebook about how it was handling users personal data. Privacy was my number one
concern back then. So when we were thinking about talking to mark, the platform was an issue. There were a bunch of privacy violations. And that was what we wanted to
talk to you about. Is there a level of privacy that just has to apply to everyone or do you think I mean, you might have a view of this is what privacy means to Mark
Zuckerberg said, This is what it's gonna mean at Facebook. Yeah, I mean, people can control this right themselves. Simple control has always been one of the important
parts of using Facebook and Kara Swisher has covered Zuckerberg since the beginning of a dinner just hanging out with she interviewed him after the company had changed
its default privacy settings. Did you feel like it's a backlash or that you feel like you're violating people's privacy? And when we started asked questions, he became
increasingly uncomfortable. You know, it's, I think the issue is you became the head of the biggest social networking company on the planet. Yeah, no.But, you know, so I started this when I was, you know, started working on this type of stuff when I was 18. So he started to sweat quite a lot. And then a lot a lot,
and then a real lot. So the kind of this kind of thing where, you know, like broadcast news where it was dripping down, like, or Tom Cruise and that Mission
Impossible. He was just, he was going to his Chan and dripping off. A lot of stuff changed as we've gone from building this project in a dorm room. And it wasn't
stopping. And I was noticing that one of the people from Facebook was like, Oh, my God, and was when I was trying to figure out what to do. Yeah, I mean,I, you know, a lot of stuff happened. But along the way, I think, um,you know, there were real learning points and turning points along the way in terms ofin terms of building things.He was in such distress and I know it sounds awful, but I felt like his mother like, Oh my God, this poor guy is gonna faint. I thought it was gonna think I did I pick
up the hoodie. different people think different things. He's told us he had the flu. I felt like he had had a panic attack is what happened. It shouldn't take off. Hey, go ahead. it's a company hoodie, we print our mission on the inside. Oh, really? The inside of the hoodie everybody take? What is it? Making the making the world more open and
connected? Oh my god. It's like a scene from that interview and from others. I mean, how would you have characterized Marc's view of privacy? Well, I, you know, I
don't know if he thought about that. It's kind of interesting, because they're very, they're very loose on it. They have a viewpoint that this helps you as the user to
get more information and they will deliver it more, sir. That's the whole ethos of Silicon Valley. By the way, if you only give us everything, we will give you free
stuff. There is a trade being made between the user and Facebook. The question is, are they protecting that that data?Facebook had been free to set its own privacy standards, because in the US, there are no overarching privacy laws that apply to this kind of data collection.But in 2010, authorities at the Federal Trade Commission became concerned.In most other parts of the world, privacy is a right, United States, not exactly. At the FTC, David vladek, was investigating whether Facebook had been deceiving its
users. what he found was that Facebook had been sharing users personal data with so called third party developers, companies that build games and apps for the
platform. And our view was that, you know, it's fine for Facebook to collect this data. But sharing this data with third parties without consent was a No, no. But at Facebook, of course, we believe that our users have complete control of their information. The heart of our cases against companies like Facebook was deceptive conduct. That is they they did not make it clear to consumers the extent to which their personal data would be shared with third parties. The FTC had another worry.
They saw the potential for data to be misused, because Facebook wasn't keeping track of what the third parties were doing with it. They had, in my view, no real
control over the third party app developers that had access to the site. They could have been anyone there was no due diligence, anyone sensually who could develop a
third party app could get access to the site, it could have been somebody working for a foreign adversary. Certainly it could have been somebody working. Yes. for, you
know, for the Russian government.face, Facebook settled with the FTC without admitting guilt, and under a consent order agreed to fix the problems. Was there an expectation at the time of the consent
order that they would staff up to ensure that their users data was not leaking out all over the place? Yes, that's that was the point of the this provision of the
consent order that required them to identify risks of personal privacy and to plug those gaps quickly, inside Facebook. However, with the IPO on the horizon, they were
also under pressure to keep monetizing all that personal information, not just fixed, the FTC has privacy issues. Nine months into my first job in tech, I ended up in
an interesting situation where, because I had been the main person who was working on privacy issues with respect to Facebook platform, which had many, many, many
privacy issues. It was a it was a real hornet's nest, and I ended up in a meeting with a bunch of the most senior executives of the company. And they went around the
room and they basically said, well, who's in charge? And the answer was me, because no one else really knew anything about it. You think that a company of the size and
importance of Facebook, you know, would have really focused and had a team of people and you know, very senior people working on these issues, but ended up being me?What did you think about that at the time, I was horrified. I didn't think I was qualified.Para keyless trying to examine all the ways that the data Facebook was sharing with third party developers could be misused. My concerns at the time were that I knew
that there were all these malicious actors who would do a wide range of bad things, given the opportunity, given the ability to target people based on this information
that Facebook had. So I started thinking through what are the worst case scenarios of what people could do with this data. And I showed some of the kinds of bad actors
that might try to attack and I share that with a number of senior executives. And the the response was, was muted, I would say, I got the sense that it just this just
wasn't their priority. They weren't that concerned about the vulnerabilities that the company was creating. They were concerned about revenue growth and user growth.
And that was expressed to you or that's something that you just gleaned from the interactions from the lack of a response.
