Senior Facebook engineers say no one at the company knows where Mark Zuckererg keeps your data
In court, two Meta engineers were questioned regarding the location of the company’s user data storage.
The engineers believed no one at the corporation would know where they could locate all of a user’s data. Newly unsealed court documents included the transcripts of their remarks.
According to recently unsealed court documents, two veteran Meta engineers were questioned about how the firm manages and saves customer data and admitted they don’t think anyone at the company could compile all the data belonging to a single user.
In connection with a consumer privacy case stemming from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica incident, the two developers were questioned in court.
The engineers were questioned in March of this year, but The Intercept was the first to report that the transcript of the hearing had just recently been made public.
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An designated technical expert by the court conducted the questioning in an effort to determine exactly what user data Facebook stores and where it is all maintained.
Eugene Zarashaw, one of the engineers, is listed on LinkedIn as the engineering director at Meta and has been employed by the company for approximately nine years. The second was Steven Elia, who is listed as a software engineering manager with 11 years of experience at Facebook on LinkedIn.
Facebook had offered the court its “Download Your Information” tool when asked what information it stores on users, but it was later discovered that this did not contain all the data the court wished to review.
Who at Facebook would be able to respond to the question, “Where is all the information on a single user stored?” was the question posed by the court-appointed expert.
It would take a huge team effort to even be able to answer that question, Zarashaw said, adding that she didn’t think there was a single person who could provide an answer.
Elia said when asked if user information and activity were saved in ad systems: “I would also agree there’s not a single person who would identify all of these or be familiar enough with all of these.
According to a Meta spokeswoman, it is not surprising that individual engineers were unable to pinpoint the whereabouts of all the data for a single user throughout the organization’s systems.
The statement continued, “We have made and are continuing to make considerable efforts to meet our privacy promises and requirements, including rigorous data controls.
One month prior to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s deposition, the business settled the lawsuit against Meta that was initially brought in 2018.
