Excerpt from An Ugly Truth: from Jan. 2014 to Aug. 2015, Facebook fired 52 staffers for exploiting access to user data, prompting an overhaul of data governance
and about the somewhat different conclusions it brought me to https://www.platformer.news/ ... https://twitter.com/... @platformer : For all followers today: - An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, reviewed - Three ways of looking at a Facebook scandal - Good tweet about the Overton window https://www.platformer.news/ ... @televiseanarchy : @josephfcox @oneunderscore__ And remember, if this is what “we know”...what we don't is so much worse. #DeleteFacebook Yael Eisenstat / @yaeleisenstat : @sheeraf @AnthroPaulicy But...but...freedom of speech! Southpaw / @nycsouthpaw : “Management's reasoning fell in line with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's early mantra, “company over country,” according to the book.” https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : I would suggest this isn't because they're routine but rather that no one respectfully should be reporting based on a Facebook blog post considering they can't be trusted. When a company politicizes, intentionally buries and misleads in purging fake accounts then take a pause. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Andrea Kuszewski / @andreakuszewski : Oh, you know this shit happens all the damn time. We just rarely hear about it. https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... @knowyourix : A Facebook engineer used his access to user data to stalk a woman he had been seeing. Through the app on her phone, he could see her location in real time. Former employees say there was nothing but “goodwill” to stop them from abusing data. https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Matthew Zeitlin / @mattzeitlin : it's not the exact same because the zuckerberg character was looking at the profile through the normal website (and it was fiction), but it's extra creepy/weird that this is what happens in literally the last scene of the social network https://twitter.com/... Sheera Frenkel / @sheeraf : THANK YOU. I've been waiting for the Cybersec folks to weigh on this, and on the Russia chapters which have a lot of previously unreported details. https://twitter.com/... Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : Authors @ceciliakang and @sheeraf have produced a valuable record of what went wrong, when, where, why, specifically in the last five years... https://www.cnn.com/... Fresh Air / @nprfreshair : TODAY: Facebook — the problems it's created and the problems it's facing. With talk with NYT reporters @sheeraf and @ceciliakang, authors of the ‘An Ugly Truth.’ They write that Facebook's problems have been features, not bugs. Kim Masters / @kimmasters : An especially lame non-denial denial. https://twitter.com/... Floor / @floorter : I thought that was the original design goal. https://twitter.com/... Andrew Coleman Francis / @andrewcfrancis : Tbf, those fired engineers were just sticking to the ideals that originally founded Facebook. https://twitter.com/... Alon Gal / @underthebreach : Could have used the leaked version of Facebook's database offline instead. This is just one aspect of how big of a fuckup Facebook made with this 533,000,000 users database leak. https://twitter.com/... Brooke Binkowski / @brooklynmarie : And “personal data” in this context could mean anything from home addresses to their deepest fears. I would love to know how many of these assholes tried set up some kind of “random meet-cute” with the women they were stalking https://twitter.com/... Sheera Frenkel / @sheeraf : Heard from a Facebook engineer this morning that their manager had told them not to buy or read our book, #anuglytruth. (He bought it anyway!) Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Facebook book response is 367 kinds of awful: “There have been 367 books published on Facebook, each claiming novel insight into how we operate. It seems this one is not only a rehash of history but relies on anecdotes supplied by mostly unnamed critics.” https://www.cnn.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The excerpt adds an internal-access dimension to the leadership and accountability failures catalogued in the review of An Ugly Truth. It sits alongside prior disputes over Facebook’s claims of ignorance about outside developers’ misuse of data, including Zuckerberg’s response to that controversy.
The reported firings, a disclosed database leak, and an alleged stalking incident make data access itself—not just third-party collection—a central governance issue for Facebook.
First-order effects
- Facebook’s overhaul of data governance puts employee use of user data under tighter internal accountability after the reported misuse cases.
- Users and Facebook’s public-facing trust are directly affected by evidence that privileged access could be abused from within the company.
Second-order effects
- The episode expands scrutiny beyond outside developers and voter-profile controversies to Facebook’s own access permissions and enforcement mechanisms.
- Facebook must defend both its internal safeguards and its claims about external misuse, making data-governance credibility harder to separate from broader platform accountability.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, major platforms will be judged not only on data-sharing policies but on whether privileged access is narrowly granted, monitored, and enforceable across their organizations.
The trend: Platform trust is increasingly determined by governance of internal data access as well as controls on third-party use of user information.