Auditing sure, but almost any Facebook software engineer has permission to still take super user actions. The ability to abuse is still there, it's just a question if they actively audit well enough to catch the abuse.

From an anonymous source, I found out it's automatic termination if you're using super mode unauthorized. Would love to get one more anonymous or non-anon source to verify.

I know of someone who had to go in front of an internal audit committee of some sort due to unauthorized access. He did it during a demo, not really thinking it through. They were convinced it was unintentional, and he got to keep his job in the end. He was telling me it was definitely considered a termination-worthy thing, and was legit worried about losing his job.

Spent time at FB, can confirm that you have to go through a few modals, your manager is notified via email, and the penalties are quite harsh. This was back in 2014

Really? Any intern could just request access and get it, and maybe get caught abusing the access?

Not sure if you can share more, but this seems way to easy and auditing is, well, to late.

When I was at FB you had to go through two confirmation modals and at least from my team (biz intelligence on ads side) it said an email would be sent to my manager if I proceeded.

I never worked in a role that required me to go further, but the penalty of losing my job deterred me just fine.

At a real company you have to write up something saying what you are planning on doing before taking any action, eg change control. I don't think that type of thing fits into the "move fast and break things" culture though.

"but almost any Facebook software engineer has permission to still take super user actions"

If this is true, I find it shocking in light of all of the recent allegations especially.

What reasons do companies like facebook have to actually make these tools safe? As long as it has the veneer of only being used for the right things, they don't really have an incentive.

No-one is going to check up on Zuck. So as long as he doesn't leak it himself, no-one is really going to know if he checks your nudes. I don't even really blame him. It's just human nature to be curious.

It’s important because locks ultimately keep good people honest.

A system where access control policy is capricious is a system that is fundamentally broken. I have been in jobs where I had the authority to hire and fire people, and make significant decisions that impact important things and spend lots of money. But guess what? I don’t have access to employee applications with PII. I don’t have access to the accounts for the business. Don’t know about employee healthcare or retirement.

If I tried to use my position to get access to that data, I would expect that issue to be escalated, even if I were the CEO. A data driven company with casual disrespect of basic principles is a problem waiting to happen.

I'm not disagreeing that it's important. I'm asking, in a corporate environment driven by capitalism and the ultimate pursuit of generating revenue/shareholder value. Why would a company care?

I know that I've seen situations where departments critical to this access control policy system were chronically understaffed, because they are cost centers. They don't generate value. In the same way I've heard security and access control dissuaded from software development, because "we just need to get this out".

What all of these situations end up with is "performative" access control. You have to act as though you need the data, but beyond that it's a free for all. This lets the company pretend like it's fulfilling it's obligations, while saving money.

Easy. Risk.

Where does the magical privilege end? Who is responsible when the all-seeing CEO is compromised personally and data or cash is exfiltrated?

A common fraud committed against public institutions like school districts or small businesses is compromise of a business manager’s account, which allows an attacker to empty the checking account.

In a public company, that sort of fraud for finance is mostly controlled by regulatory compliance. But as we know, information or data has value. Value as a commodity, value as a competitive advantage, etc.

This.

That

The other

Abuse scandals erode user trust in the product which is bad because growth over everything seems to be the name of the game. Worse for publicly traded companies as it could impact dollars. Not so much anymore as the news cycles are so short that the impact on the stock only lasts a couple days before bots buy up the dip.

“Perception is reality” was an internal slogan at the time. So if users (at the time) believed it was evil maybe they leave or maybe a possible new users chooses not to sign up.

The other thing too is employees abusing such a tool with other employees. When you use super you assume the user id of the user of your choice. That’s pretty dangerous and there are way better ways of helping a user fix an account issue than signing in as them. If employees can’t trust each other not to snoop then how can users trust the company not to snoop? It had to be addressed internally at the time of the intern that was creeping on someone and that’s when things started getting locked down and more auditing applied. But I think it boils down to PR. If you run a company online trust is everything. I’m sure this crowd understands that nothing online is secure but Facebook was built for the masses and they need to have that blind trust that they’re personal lives are private.

> “Perception is reality” was an internal slogan at the time.

I don't think this line really conveys the weight of the slogan. That slogan is applicable in so many fields and pretty much all the time. Even just in small social circles, not just politics, whether corporate or government.

> No-one is going to check up on Zuck.

Except an engineer with a grudge, or a moral objection. Or an investigative reporter. Or a hacker.

Phish Zuck successfully and you have the keys to the castle.