[edibrac]

I believe that it's within reason that FB's internal controls are lax (like any other company) depending on what sort of access you have as an employee, contractor or family member of an employee ... or even a friend. It's totally possible for an internal employee to forget to encrypt a drive, or leave a backup somewhere of something. Or if a friend borrowed the password of an employee. I even think it's totally within reason that an employee could be paid off if the (extreme) situation deemed it necessary.

"OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible"

...sure that applies to the outer shell of it, and the official public stance. What else happens internally?

Disclaimer: my comments just are a result of trying to think critically. I could be totally/partially incorrect or correct. I do believe there is a truth out there about it, but that it's not in FB's interest to be super upfront.

[naisu]

Disclaimer: I work for fb.

Do you really think Facebook employees are wandering around town with backups of user data? That's completely ridiculous.

Facebook takes privacy very seriously. You Facebook data is no less safe than using Gmail for your email (as an example).

[edibrac]

I took time to word what I said, to match what I mean. It seems that what you read, were ones that you seem to have injected in.

It would be nice to know exactly what precautions are taken to prevent access from insiders. You may work for FB, but is storage or backups part of your role? Not that I think you have to be, how would I know as an outsider. Maybe as a developer you know how things are setup, and how well people adhere to policies.

And I'm curious, what are those? If users' data is taken seriously then wouldn't they make difficult to prevent casual snooping across the database? So that even if you had root access you couldn't get to it as an insider?

Probably not. The data is meant to feed an ad/marketing machine so, how locked down could the data be internally?

I don't expect these questions to be answered, but just throwing them out there in an attempt to reason things out.