Guaranteed there was a collective facepalm from all engineers working at facebook when they announced those "privacy changes" to WhatsApp.

Who makes these decisions? Surely it's from people higher to the top than the bottom and not at all the kind of people that would implement such a feature.

Actions speak louder than words and it would have been more meaningful to set some actual policy and protections for people bringing such privacy-violating product decisions to task rather then send the corporate equivalent of a "like and share" post.

I've never met an engineer that was anti-privacy or anti-security... Those traits are exclusively donned by product people trying to push a feature out on time or hit a kpi at the expense of bigger picture thinking.

It was programmers working totally on their own ruined Volkswagen with their pesky cheating algo for the emissions test.

So perhaps programmers working totally on their own can make privacy work for Facebook.

Rogue Google employees did a good job breaking up Google's search monopoly, so there's precedent for this kind of roll-up-your-sleeves success.

> breaking up Google's search monopoly

Google has 90% market share still. I'd thus still call that monopoly unbroken.

You may have missed the invisible <sarcasm> tag on the post above.

Yeah now that you say it I see it too.

Hee hee.

I wish I could put "sarcasm" label in a tooltip or something. It would still annoy people to have to mouse over to reveal the tip (I still win) but my intent would at least be explicit (everyone else wins).

Actually, engineers in big companies have more control than it seems. After all, privacy is not only about intent, but also execution, and care needs to be taken at every level.

Privacy requires engagement from all levels, and I'm this case Facebook seems to be doing the trigger thing after f*** things up quite a bit in the past.

It was intentionally "leaked"; the whole thing is a PR move. Facebook's entire business is predicated upon having intimate knowledge of its users and is as such irreconcilable with the concept of privacy.

Hi, I wrote the story. It was not leaked by PR. Did they anticipate it might go out? Perhaps. But consider: Boz wrote it a month ago. If they wanted this out in public, they did a poor job getting it out. This was an internal memo meant for an internal audience to address an internal problem.

Who leaked it to you, then?

> This was an internal memo meant for an internal audience to address an internal problem.

Do you actually think this can address "the problem" or is it performance?

I don't reveal sources. This is another step trying to put Facebook on a path where it's compliant with the FTC settlement.

Why is this downvoted? Zuck decried leaks for years when "leak it to the press" became the only way for rank-and-file employees to affect change on contentious topics, particularly in the wake of Cambridge Analytica. Anything sent to employees these days is 100% expected to be repeated in the press and would be written with that in mind.

> Why is this downvoted?

HN is predominantly ad-tech or ad-tech related people. It's uncomfortable for them.

This is like a workplace responding to overwork-related crises (rage quitting, health problems, suicides, etc) by telling people that they need to do some wellness courses.

And then telling them to do more work.

Yeah they do that too lol https://en.pingwest.com/a/3649

"Mr. Yin claimed that he watched as his director typed the report of their one-on-one meeting into his computer and pressed the send button. Afterwards, he told his director in a small talk that he was busy with many personal affairs and felt stressed. Unexpectedly, in the email he later received, a company HR emphasized to him that the company offers psychological help and told the contact information to him, which he suspected was the result of his director snitching him out and made him feel betrayed."

The beatings will continue until morale improves.