Facebook Mitarbeiter konnten via Master-Passwort auf jedes Profil zugreifen, und dann heißt es der Datenschutz beim StudiVZ sei schlecht…
Laut einem Interview einer anonymen Facebook Mitarbeiterin, konnte jeder, der das Passwort kannte und innerhalb des Büros war, auf jedes Profil zugreifen und sich auch dort einloggen, dabei wurden sogar Daten von Usern verändert:
[…]
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.
Rumpus: What did they do?
Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired.
[…]
Das Interview gibt noch weitere interessante Einblicke in Facebook, so wird zum Beispiel ebenfalls wie bei StudiVZ alles für immer gespeichert. Egal ob man etwas löscht oder nicht, auf den Servern bleibt es für immer erhalten. Außerdem werden die User getrackt, wenn ich zum Beispiel oft genug auf einem Userprofil war, dann wird dies intern als mein „Freund“ gelistet. Wer sich selber einen Überblick verschaffen möchte, sollte umbedingt die vier Seiten des Interviews lesen, es lohnt sich!