Facebook has long been embroiled in privacy issues, owing to the company's explicit business model of selling user data. However, a newly leaked paper shows that the situation there may be far worse than we believed.
Leaked Document: Facebook Has No Idea How To Manage User Data
Engadget cited an internal report which said that Facebook is unable to account for most of the personal data it holds, including what it's used for and where it's stored.
Last year, Facebook's Ad and Business Product team's privacy engineers put out a report that was intended to be read by the company's executives. It outlined how Facebook could deal with an increasing number of data usage regulations, such as new privacy laws in India, South Africa, and other countries. The authors of the report portrayed that the platform was frequently unaware of the personal data of its estimated 1.9 billion users.
To be more specific, 9to5Mac said that even Facebook engineers acknowledge that the company has no control over how user data is handled within the company. The Facebook Ad team cautioned the social network's executives that promising governments any changes in these areas would be difficult.
"We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as "we will not use X data for Y purpose." And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do, increasing our risk of mistakes and misrepresentation," wrote the report's authors.
What Is Facebook's Biggest Hurdle Comes to Tracing Down User Data?
According to Engadget, citing the report, the lack of "closed-form" systems appears to be Facebook's biggest roadblock to tracking down user data. To describe how tough it is to track down certain Facebook data, the authors said:
"We fundamentally lack closed-form properties in Facebook systems. For more than a decade, openness and empowering individual contributors has been part of our culture. We've built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) ... and it flows ... everywhere. How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?"
Meanwhile, although a Facebook representative denied that the social media platform is breaking any laws, 9to5Mac reported that an unnamed employee called the situation a "complete shitshow."
It is also mentioned that the social network has lost more than $10 dollars in revenue since launching App Tracking Transparency last year.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta is revamping its advertising model to target iOS consumers. Of course, Facebook continues to blast Apple's privacy policies, claiming that they are damaging to both users and businesses.
