> Anecdotally I've heard of interns getting fired for just looking at profiles (that they aren't actual friends with) even around 5 years ago. So at least they take it somewhat seriously.

So the customer's privacy got violated, because interns had blanket access to private customer data. To me that's very much not taking security seriously.

i interned at fb a few years ago. any engineer, intern or not, can access production data. day one you set up an instance of fb on your dev server that you can mess around with, and its connected straight to the prod db. you're able to view anything you want, but they're very adamant that they monitor what you look at.

"its connected straight to the prod db"

I can't believe what I am reading. Why is that? Why use customer data for dev purposes. Why not work on some mock data?

I ask out of curiosity. If you have a P1 escalation due to an issue that is reproducible only in production environment but not with your test environment with mock data, how do you plan to troubleshoot it?

Yes, but you have to explicitly request data every time you access anything. IDK what it was like when you interned, but that's what it's like today.

was not the case when i was there, and it wasn't all that long ago

You and esman1 both could be right. I work at a company of similar size and sophistication as Facebook. Sometimes whether or not you have access to production data by default depends on which team you work for.