Facebook Has No Clue Where Its User Data Ends Up: Report

Meta Platforms Inc’s FB Facebook social media platform has no idea about where its users’ data ends up, according to a new report. 

What Happened: The revelation was made by Vice’s Motherboard citing a document written by Facebook privacy engineers on the company’s Ad and Business Product (ABP) team last year.

“We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’” said the authors of the document, reported Vice.

“And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do, increasing our risk of mistakes and misrepresentation.” 

The engineers used an analogy of ink being poured into a lake to explain how data flows through Facebook.

“Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere.”

3PD, 1PD, SCD refer to third-party data, first-party data and sensitive categories data respectively. 

The authors of the document wrote, “How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”

An anonymous Facebook employee who saw the document told Vice that Facebook has a general idea of “how many bits of data are stored in its data centers.”

“The where [the data] goes part is, broadly speaking, a complete s***show,” said the employee, according to Vice.

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Why It Matters: Facebook engineers admitted they have trouble keeping track of user data. They termed this issue “data lineage,” according to Vice.

The document makes reference to incoming “impactful regulations” from India, Thailand, South Korea and other jurisdictions. 

“We face a tsunami of inbound regulations that all carry massive uncertainty,” wrote the ABP team.

A Facebook spokesperson said the document “does not describe our extensive processes and controls to comply with privacy regulations, it's simply inaccurate to conclude that it demonstrates non-compliance,” reported Vice.

The spokesperson also addressed the ink analogy and said, “this analogy lacks the context that we do, in fact, have extensive processes and controls to manage data and comply with privacy regulations.”

FB Price Action: Meta shares were trading down 2.01% at $177.31 Wednesday morning, according to Benzinga Pro data.

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