Speaker 1: The past two weeks have been some of the most
Speaker 1: devastating for Facebook. The Federal Trade Commission has confirmed it
Speaker 1: is investigating Facebook's privacy practices. Facebook stock dropping even lower
Speaker 1: in the fallout, and this morning, Facebook executives are heading
Speaker 1: the Capitol Hill. Can Mark Zuckerberg keep both advertisers and
Speaker 1: lawmakers happy? Many of you will know the highlights by now.
Speaker 1: There's that political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica, which got
Speaker 1: information on fifty million Facebook users, mostly without their permission,
Speaker 1: and they later went on to advise Donald Trump on
Speaker 1: its presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica told Facebook that it deleted
Speaker 1: the data, then two weeks ago stories in The Guardian
Speaker 1: and The New York Times declared that it didn't. People
Speaker 1: were so furious they started deleting their Facebook profiles, and
Speaker 1: as of this taping, Facebook stock lost tens of billions
Speaker 1: of dollars in value. Inside Faceboo's headquarters in Menlo Park,
Speaker 1: the atmosphere right now is pretty tense. Employees are distracted,
Speaker 1: reading the news, mingling in small groups to whisper about
Speaker 1: the latest one the crisis. Many of them joined Facebook
Speaker 1: because they felt like it was doing something really good
Speaker 1: for the world. It had a mission everyone believed in,
Speaker 1: but now some of them aren't so sure. For both
Speaker 1: current and former Facebook employees, this is not just about
Speaker 1: Cambridge Analytica. It's become this moment of reckoning, of realizing
Speaker 1: this immense power that Facebook now holds and the responsibilities
Speaker 1: of that. Hi Imako and I'm Sarah Friar, and this
Speaker 1: week on Decrypted, we're going to hear from a number
Speaker 1: of former insiders at the social network. We the public
Speaker 1: are still discovering things that Facebook really does with our data,
Speaker 1: and for a lot of people, the realizations have been
Speaker 1: a little shocking some of them. Value with its tight
Speaker 1: knit community, can be a hard place to speak out.
Speaker 1: That's especially the case for people who've worked for Facebook.
Speaker 1: But now after a series of controversies, some former employees
Speaker 1: are starting to air their hesitations and criticisms in public.
Speaker 1: And with that, we're getting our first peek into the
Speaker 1: culture that led to Facebook's crisis. Today, stay with us, So, Sarah,
Speaker 1: let's start with some context back a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: Is incredibly unusual for a former employee to criticize Facebook publicly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Facebook has this culture where they really wanted to feel
Speaker 1: like a family, and you're given access to all this
Speaker 1: non public information about the company roadmap, so employees feel
Speaker 1: an immense responsibility to keep it safe your Facebook friends,
Speaker 1: with all your coworkers. If you speak to the press,
Speaker 1: you're hurting the family, right, And the company is known
Speaker 1: for searching for leakers. Zacher Berry actually announces at all
Speaker 1: hands meetings when someone who leaked gets fired, and sometimes
Speaker 1: people applaud. Employees are told that once they leave, they're
Speaker 1: still part of the Facebook family, which has extensive reach
Speaker 1: and influence across the Silicon Valley, so don't screw it up.
Speaker 1: But we did start to see more people speak up
Speaker 1: right after Trump won the election in the fall of right.
Speaker 1: So Facebook is headquartered right here in the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: which is a very progressive place, so a lot of
Speaker 1: people who worked at Facebook lean towards the liberal side too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they wondered if they are, in tiny or big ways,
Speaker 1: partly responsible for Trump's victory. This is something we covered
Speaker 1: on the show in an episode back then, and people
Speaker 1: have been talking about it since. I've spoken to a
Speaker 1: lot of former and current employees over the last year
Speaker 1: and a half who are definitely they're grappling with this
Speaker 1: question in pretty personal ways. They're facing questions from their
Speaker 1: own friends about whether Facebook has been doing the right thing.
Speaker 1: And we've seen that with fake news and Russia's manipulation
Speaker 1: of the election. And you've had a very busy job
Speaker 1: over the last year and a half. It's been a
Speaker 1: little crazy. At the end of last year, to moth
Speaker 1: Paula Hapatia, he's now a high profile investor, but used
Speaker 1: to be a key executive in Facebook's early days of growth.
Speaker 1: He talked to a group of Stanford University students about
Speaker 1: some soul searching he was doing. I feel tremendous guilt. Um.
Speaker 1: I think we I think we all knew in the
Speaker 1: back of our minds, even though we feigned this whole
Speaker 1: line of like there probably aren't any really bad, unintended consequences.
Speaker 1: I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds,
Speaker 1: we we kind of new something bad could happen. Chama
Speaker 1: was talking to a pretty small audience, but these comments
Speaker 1: just blew up in the media. He probably wasn't expecting it.
Speaker 1: Since he's a good friend of the management team at Facebook.
Speaker 1: You can imagine he got a lot of calls and
Speaker 1: text after that. Because he then made this strange appearance
Speaker 1: on TV where he said he wasn't talking about Facebook,
Speaker 1: he was talking about social media in general. It's not
Speaker 1: like he was trying to walk it all back. Jam
Speaker 1: isn't the only one who made his name off Facebook
Speaker 1: and is talking about them now. Sean Parker, who joined
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook's earliest days and was the president
Speaker 1: of the company for a while. A huge chunk of
Speaker 1: his wealth comes from his time at Facebook, and he
Speaker 1: said last year that these tools were built to psychologically
Speaker 1: manipulate people. Just In Rosenstein. He's the guy who's credited
Speaker 1: with inventing Facebook's like button. No words about technology addiction
Speaker 1: and Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's co founders, talked of
Speaker 1: Limberg in an interview that was taped a couple of
Speaker 1: months ago. I think Mark in particular has been really
Speaker 1: clear about Facebook's responsibility in the election and has taken
Speaker 1: stock of his own responsibility to think about how Facebook
Speaker 1: influences our politics and our culture, and the recent changes
Speaker 1: with the news feed and some of the other things
Speaker 1: that they're doing are a reflection of that. But the
Speaker 1: first step is understanding that that responsibility exists and I think,
Speaker 1: at least in Facebook's case, there's an embrace of that.
Speaker 1: Then two weeks ago, the criticism around Facebook notched into
Speaker 1: higher gear after the news broke that Cambridge Analytica still
Speaker 1: had the data it improperly obtained millions of people. More
Speaker 1: people came forward to voice their criticism of Facebook. One
Speaker 1: vocal critic has been Sandy Parkles. His job was to
Speaker 1: address data privacy issues with regards to all the external
Speaker 1: apps that get access to our data on Facebook when
Speaker 1: we log in using Facebook. Right after the Cambridge Analytica
Speaker 1: scandal broke, Sandy wrote an op ed in the Washington
Speaker 1: Post apparently in two thousand twelve, way before Cambridge Analytica
Speaker 1: harvested the data on the millions of users, he tried
Speaker 1: to warn Facebook's executives about the lack of protections that
Speaker 1: were in place. Sandy taped this interview with PBSS Frontline
Speaker 1: before the scandal broke because I had been the main
Speaker 1: person who was working on uh privacy issues with respect
Speaker 1: to Facebook platform, which had many, many, many privacy issues.
Speaker 1: It was it was a real hornets nest of problems
Speaker 1: because they were giving access to all this Facebook data
Speaker 1: to developers with very few controls. Sandy was actually a
Speaker 1: musician before he decided to go back to grad school
Speaker 1: and get into tech, and this was his first job
Speaker 1: in the tech industry. Due to i'd say organizational chaos
Speaker 1: and you know, a lack of prioritization of privacy, ended
Speaker 1: up being me, what did you think about that? At
Speaker 1: the time, I was horrified. I didn't think it always qualified.
Speaker 1: Did you say that to anybody? I did? Yeah, I did,
Speaker 1: And the response I got back was basically, you know,
Speaker 1: don't you think this is important? It was essentially people
Speaker 1: above me didn't want to be on the hook for this.
Speaker 1: I spoke to another former Facebook employee, someone who joined
Speaker 1: long after Sandy left. His name is Kevin Lee, and
Speaker 1: when he was at Facebook, he worked on global spam operations.
Speaker 1: This is his first time speaking out about it. My
Speaker 1: team was more focused on the mass scale of these things,
Speaker 1: so it's really around bought attacks and really mass creation
Speaker 1: of either of fake profiles or the mass kind of
Speaker 1: takeover of legitimate accounts to spread either misinformation or scams.
Speaker 1: Kevin started at Spoke in November and left the company
Speaker 1: two years later right after the presidential election. The focus
Speaker 1: of the current scandal how app developers were able to
Speaker 1: access data on millions of people. Well, that fell outside
Speaker 1: of Kevin's purview, but still he was able to see
Speaker 1: that Facebook wasn't in the habit of enforcing its terms
Speaker 1: and conditions with developers. In this case, hindsight is here.
Speaker 1: I think the biggest area that was not adhered to
Speaker 1: or not given enough attention was specifically around the enforcement
Speaker 1: of developer policies. So the developer policies were changed to
Speaker 1: be more private and kind of keep user information more
Speaker 1: secure and more kind of private. However, there wasn't enough
Speaker 1: enforcement in my opinion, in terms of Okay, now that
Speaker 1: we've changed our policies, are we really are we double
Speaker 1: checking to make sure that the people that had access
Speaker 1: to this data prior have deleted it or have taken
Speaker 1: the necessary steps to remove it. I don't think from
Speaker 1: a enforcement standpoint that was there was enough attention paid there.
Speaker 1: So when you were at Facebook, why do you why
Speaker 1: do you think they didn't devote more resources into enforcements.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can hypothesize that's really more of a
Speaker 1: developer um community question. I think there were resources devoted
Speaker 1: to it, but there's always a trade off in terms
Speaker 1: of Okay, we want to open up our developer APIs,
Speaker 1: we want to grow the company, and oftentimes there's this
Speaker 1: trade off between security and privacy versus opening up the
Speaker 1: platform and making it as viral or really addictive as possible.
Speaker 1: And some of those decisions, um, maybe we're made more
Speaker 1: on the growth side of things, and UH as a
Speaker 1: result opened them up to more potential exposure to some
Speaker 1: case just like this. This is actually something that I've
Speaker 1: heard a lot from other form we're in current employees
Speaker 1: that Facebook prioritize growing its user base over other needs
Speaker 1: like securing user data. There was a internal model at
Speaker 1: Facebook and it's been published. The mottel was like move
Speaker 1: fast and break things, and that was very much a
Speaker 1: mantra that the company followed for years. I think, I
Speaker 1: mean it's shifted a bit, but essentially, unfortunately in this case,
Speaker 1: the company did move fast and what it broke was
Speaker 1: really user trust and now there's a lot of repair
Speaker 1: work and a lot of goodwill that needs to be
Speaker 1: build again. For some people, the public criticism of Facebook
Speaker 1: put them in a pretty awkward position. This is what
Speaker 1: one former employee, Brett Taylor, told her colleague Emily Chang
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg TV. You have people like Brian Acton, the
Speaker 1: co founder of WhatsApp, which Facebook bought for twenty billion dollars,
Speaker 1: saying to delete Facebook, and other former Facebook insiders, you know,
Speaker 1: really talking about out the potential threats of the social network.
Speaker 1: Are you in that camp? You know? I I have
Speaker 1: a great deal of you know, personal connection and loyalty
Speaker 1: to that company, So it is obviously sort of uncomfortable
Speaker 1: for me to talk about. The thing I would say
Speaker 1: is that I do think that it's the right way
Speaker 1: to think about it. Is that these technologies have changed
Speaker 1: sort of the landscape of our society. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: everything from the smartphone. We can call that the artful dodge. Well,
Speaker 1: even with more people speaking up, there's still this expectation
Speaker 1: to keep your agreements as private. There are two things
Speaker 1: that happened just this week that illustrate this. So I
Speaker 1: got a tip on a project and I asked a
Speaker 1: current employee about it. Everyone at Facebook has access to
Speaker 1: all of this information internally, but he was afraid to
Speaker 1: even search for the code name I gave him because
Speaker 1: Facebook would be able to see his query. No, he
Speaker 1: talked to me and fire him. I told him don't
Speaker 1: worry about it. I don't want you to get fired.
Speaker 1: In another case, a former employee posted online that they'd
Speaker 1: be able to help people understand the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Speaker 1: The post didn't stay up very long. They've removed it
Speaker 1: when Facebook sent them and note reminding them of their
Speaker 1: contractual confidentiality agreement. So Facebook had someone following all this
Speaker 1: internet chatter seems like it, but some people in Facebook's
Speaker 1: community do see a silver lining to the crises that
Speaker 1: the company has gone through, like Michael Hofflinger. He worked
Speaker 1: on ads at Facebook and went on to write a
Speaker 1: book about the company. Michael told me that he hopes
Speaker 1: this could be a lesson that will make Facebook a
Speaker 1: better company in the future, you know, and I hope
Speaker 1: that in this discussion, in the critique that's coming, especially
Speaker 1: from folks that have been inside of Facebook, that the
Speaker 1: objective really is to get to a future where we
Speaker 1: become smarter at how we build, more empathetic about how
Speaker 1: we build, not about not building. And Facebook has already
Speaker 1: announced some changes. There was a big one just this
Speaker 1: week about how they're limiting the third party data that
Speaker 1: advertisers can use to target people on the network. This
Speaker 1: is something that could actually make it harder for advertisers
Speaker 1: to use Facebook. That's not usually the direction they move in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it means less money for Facebook, right right, It could
Speaker 1: potentially mean that. And then there is, according to my sources,
Speaker 1: just this in depth review happening at Facebook and every
Speaker 1: team going through all the different data uses of every
Speaker 1: part of Facebook and figuring out if those are actually necessary,
Speaker 1: like do we need this data in order to create
Speaker 1: a better user experience. So I'm sure we're going to
Speaker 1: keep learning more of the next few weeks, and publicly,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in
Speaker 1: front of Congress pretty soon. We don't know exactly when,
Speaker 1: but it'll happen. What's the number one thing you'll be
Speaker 1: looking for in that testimony. I just think it's going
Speaker 1: to be so difficult for him because a lot of
Speaker 1: these questions are about things Facebook did wrong so many
Speaker 1: years ago, and the way somebody explained it to me.
Speaker 1: One of the users I talked to actually explained to
Speaker 1: the best. He said, it's like toothpaste out of the tube,
Speaker 1: like the data that Facebook shared with developers way back
Speaker 1: when they are not able to tell Congress today where
Speaker 1: that data is now. There was no like auditing that
Speaker 1: happened back then to try to chart this out. So
Speaker 1: zach Arberg is going to go to Congress and he's
Speaker 1: going to be explaining how far Facebook has come and
Speaker 1: protecting its users, and he has to hope that that
Speaker 1: will be enough. You know, ahead of this episode, we
Speaker 1: asked our listeners to send in their own questions for
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg. We'll close our episode today with a couple
Speaker 1: of our favorites. Rebecca goose Man from Burlston, Texas. Why
Speaker 1: should we stay on your platform after your company violated
Speaker 1: the trust and I have to see of millions of users. Hi,
Speaker 1: my name's Marcus. I'm from Germany and my question is
Speaker 1: Mrs Lackaberg. How can you justify deliberately deceiving all of
Speaker 1: your users to get access to their private information even
Speaker 1: though your apps and the disclaim is involved a delusive
Speaker 1: and non exhaustive referring to the excessive amounts of data
Speaker 1: that you actually collect. Greg Wall. At the end of
Speaker 1: the day, Mark, will you and your product be a
Speaker 1: tool for greater good or a tool for mass surveillance?
Speaker 1: This is Paul Johnson from Pennsylvania, Sincerely, at night, when
Speaker 1: it's you got an a pillow? Do you ever think
Speaker 1: that anything that you've done is wrong? And then for
Speaker 1: this week's episode of Decrypted, thanks for listening. We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear what you thought of today's show. You can
Speaker 1: email us at Decrypted at bloomberg dot net, or you
Speaker 1: can find me on Twitter at Sarah Fryar and I've
Speaker 1: met aki Eto seven. If you haven't already, we hope
Speaker 1: you'll subscribe to Decrypted wherever you get your podcasts, and
Speaker 1: while you're there, please leave us a rating in a review.
Speaker 1: I read all of them as they come in, and
Speaker 1: they really help us reach more listeners. This episode was
Speaker 1: produced by Pia gut Car, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson.
Speaker 1: Francesca Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll see
Speaker 1: you next week.