Book: Creepy Facebook Engineer Used Data from Platform to Stalk Woman After Fight

According to an upcoming exposé of Facebook, a company engineer abused his employee access to user data to track down a woman who had left him after they fought while traveling together. This is just one of the troubling abuses of privacy documented in the book.

Business Insider reports that according to an upcoming book by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang titled: An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, a Facebook engineer abused his access to Facebook user data to track down a woman who had left him after they fought while traveling together.

The engineer, who is not named, allegedly accessed the data to “confront” the woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left their hotel room. The engineer was able to use Facebook user data to determine her location at a different hotel.

Another Facebook engineer reportedly used his employee access to dig up information on a woman he had dated after she stopped responding to his messages. Using Facebook’s tools, the engineer was able to gain access to “years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on.” As the woman also had Facebook installed on her phone, he was able to track her location in real-time.

The book states that Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to “cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers.” The book adds: “There was nothing but the goodwill of the employees themselves to stop them from abusing their access to users’ private information.”

The book states that most of the engineers who took advantage of the access they had to user data were “men who looked up the Facebook profiles of women they were interested in.”

“We’ve always had zero tolerance for abuse and have fired every single employee ever found to be improperly accessing data,” a spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. “Since 2015, we’ve continued to strengthen our employee training, abuse detection, and prevention protocols. We’re also continuing to reduce the need for engineers to access some types of data as they work to build and support our services.”