Between January 2014 and August 2015, the company fired 52 employees for exploiting user data for personal means, according to an advance copy of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination” that Insider obtained.
The engineer, who is unnamed, reportedly tapped into the data to “confront” a woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left the hotel room they had been sharing. He was able to figure out her location at a different hotel.
Another Facebook engineer used his employee access to dig up information on a woman with whom he had gone on a date after she stopped responding to his messages. In the company’s systems, he had 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,” according to the book. Through the Facebook app the woman had installed on her phone, the book claims, he was also able to see her location in real time.
Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to “cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers,” the book says.