[benreesman]

Could be a question of what we worked on. I did Ads ML Infrastructure, Abuse Detection Systems (spam basically), and then more ML Infrastructure on IG Feed/Stories. I was deep enough in the engine room it was all more or less feature embeddings. So it’s probably fair to say I would have known less about strategic maneuvering than plenty of less tenured folks closer to the surface.

I knew it sounded vaguely sketchy but you remember how many vaguely sketchy things some frisky new PM tried to get pushed through a launch card meeting only to have someone on Sheryl’s radar detonate it on the launch pad. The timeframe is the main reason I’m skeptical: Sheryl didn’t put up with crap like that she knew what was at stake.

[sunshowers]

I was on devinfra/source control (worked 2012-2018 in that area before switching to Libra) so we weren't making decisions, but we got to saw a bunch of what happened as it happened. Onavo was always treated as pretty sus among the people I worked with, who were largely linux/free software/security types.

As Pedro said in the email described in [1], no sufficiently well-informed, security-minded person could ever be comfortable with Onavo.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-sn...