Facebook engineers used their power to track down women they liked

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A new book called “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination” was recently published, and it reveals some not-so-great details about how the company is run. One of the biggest controversies covered in the book is the company’s employee access to user data, and how that has been abused in the past.

According to a new report from Business Insider, the book, written by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, details some of the ways that Facebook employees had taken advantage of their access to users’ data.

The book details one engineer (who remains unnamed) and how they utilized their position at Facebook to track down the location of a particular woman. The engineer had been vacationing with the woman when they had a fight, and she went to stay somewhere else. The engineer used their Facebook power to track the woman’s location to another hotel, where they would then confront her.

This is, of course, not the only instance of something like this happening at Facebook. The book also details a couple of other engineers who have abused their power in order to learn something about a woman they might be interested in. In fact, Facebook fired a total of 52 people in 2014 and 2015 for abusing their access to user data.

This is obviously a very bad look for Facebook. The social platform has remained in the negative spotlight over the past couple of years, mainly due to privacy concerns from its users. Unfortunately, the things revealed in this book show that those concerns are warranted.

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Alex Gatewood

Staff writer at KnowTechie. Alex has two years of experience covering all things technology, from video games to electric cars. He's a gamer at heart, with a passion for first-person shooters and expansive RPGs. Shoot him an email at alex@knowtechie.com