Former Employee: ‘Horrifying’ Misuse of User Data Was Routine at Facebook

Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook platform operations manager, claimed the company’s “horrifying” misuse of user data was routine, and that Facebook preferred to have “no idea” what third parties were doing with the freely available data.
In their report, the Guardian noted that “hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica.”

“My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data,” claimed Parakilas. “It has been painful watching… Because I know that they could have prevented it.”

“Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on,” he continued, adding, “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening.”

“They felt that it was better not to know. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying,” Parakilas declared, also estimating that “a majority of Facebook users” probably had their data used by third party companies and developers.

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