As Facebook raised a privacy wall, chopped it into an opening for technical girls
Facebook's agreement with regulators is a result of the company's early experiments with data sharing. By the end of 2009, the privacy settings of the 400 million people changed, then used the service, which made some of their information available to the entire Internet. Then it shared this information, including users' locations and religious and political figures, with Microsoft and other partners.
Facebook called this "instant customization" and promoted it as a step towards a better internet where other companies would use the information to customize what people saw on sites like Bing. However, the feature drew complaints from privacy officers and many Facebook users that the social network had shared the information without permission.
F.T.C. Investigated and 2011 cited privacy changes as a deceptive practice. Captivated by the guard, Facebook officials stopped saying immediate personalization in the public and entered into the consent agreement.
Under the decree, the social network introduced a "comprehensive privacy program" which was charged with reviewing new products and features. It was originally monitored by two top privacy officers, their high title, a clear indication of Facebook's commitment. The company has also employed PricewaterhouseCoopers to review its privacy practices every other year.
However, the privacy program met some internal resistance from the start, according to four former Facebook employees, with direct knowledge of the company's efforts. Some engineers and managers, they said, evaluated privacy assessments a barrier to rapid innovation and growth. And the core team responsible for coordinating the reviews – numbering about a dozen people by 2016 – was moved around in Facebook's scattered organization, sending mixed signals about how serious the company took it, said the former employees.
Critically many of Facebook's special sharing partnerships were not subject to comprehensive privacy program reviews, said two of the former employees. Leaders believed that because the partnerships were governed by business contracts that demand that they follow Facebook data policies, they did not need the same level of control. The privacy had limited ability to review or propose changes to any of these data sharing agreements, which had been negotiated by more senior officials in the company.
Facebook officials said that privacy members had been consulted about the sharing agreements, but that the rating level "depends on the specific partnership and the time it was created."
