Here is an excellent description of the Big Tech employee today: "but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them".
Yes, Facebook is like a cult. You can verify this by asking any Facebook employee their view on privacy. You will usually get a ramble which will look exactly like the other passage from that essay:
"that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts.... who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for."
And I will add 6) why privacy does not matter.
My point is: I think this person is lying. Now, if only Facebook open sourced its entire codebase, I would be willing to take back my view. See the problem here? It will be back to square one.
"Trust us. We know we are right. And we must be right because we are successful.."
"We're sorry, we can do better." ad nauseam.
I'm fairly certain that if this has been happening for years, somebody would have leaked confirmation or publicly admitted to it by now.
They'd have to be using some very sophisticated techniques to hide internally that they're doing it, given that engineers can all see the entire codebase. I was pretty intimately familiar with every bit of the build process; it'd have been hard to miss some injection of secret code. Also, the benefit would be minuscule, and the threat to their reputation if caught (given that Zuckerberg has very explicitly claimed not to be doing this) would be huge.
I am almost certain that it's not happening on Android either, but I'm not as familiar with that codebase, so I won't claim to know first hand.