News of Facebook's secret tool to delete executive messages caps days of chaos

[turbinetree]

When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, embarked on a media apology tour Thursday, it seemed possible that the woman known as Mark Zuckerberg’s “adult supervision” would bring calm to the troubled company’s image.

But the past 48 hours have shown that not even Sandberg’s steady hand can keep this car from spinning out of control.

On Friday, Facebook was again under fire, both over the discovery that the company has a two-tiered privacy standard (one for executives, one for everyone else) and over its use of facial recognition software.

TechCrunch reported late Thursday that Facebook has been using a secret tool to delete messages sent by its executives from the inboxes of their recipients, without disclosing the deletions to the recipients or even recording there was ever a message in the first place.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/06/facebook-using-secret-tool-to-delete-messages-from-executives

[Hekate]

1. KnR

[procon]

2. They still don't get the whole privacy thing if they are accessing other people's computers

and rifling through their emails to delete them and wipe out any trace if the receipt.

[mr_lebowski]

3. Do you understand why email apps are generally called email 'clients'?

When you view emails, it's generally via what's called email client (that's probably what 95% of us use when looking at emails) which means we're actually looking at a file that's being stored elsewhere on a server (at gmail, yahoo, or whatever), it's not a file that's on our own machine (except perhaps transitively, for performance reasons). And that sort of a 'local save' happens transparently to you, the end user, when it does happen.

Also, most email servers (esp one you be using in a large corporation) support 'sender-side deletes' i.e. the original sender can remove the 'sent copy' from the server that you've viewed (or perhaps not, doesn't matter) via your email client (which will trigger deleting any of the aforementioned auto-saved transitive copies as well), and if the server is configured to do so, will also erase it's existence from any 'log', especially one you as a 'user' would have access to.

That said, I'm sure that if you thought to take screenshots and save copies, or you downloaded the email as an HTML or text file or whatnot to your local machine while viewing, the company/original sender isn't going to go 'rifling' through all your computer files to locate whatever type of copy of the email you may've saved. That would be quite a task, actually, esp. if you had any notion that you needed to protect your copy(s) and took measures to do so.

Main point I'm making here is ... 'your emails' aren't 'on your computer' ... unless you take steps to make them so. And I'm sure that if you DID so, the app deleting the emails from the server ... isn't going to 'rifle' through your computer to delete the copies you've made and saved.

[Squinch]

4. And still people use Facebook.