Court documents have revealed that one of the two senior Facebook-parent Meta engineers, when grilled about how the social media company stores and keeps track of data of its users, said that he does not believe that a single employee could compile all the data of any user, as per a report by The Intercept.
The veteran engineer goes by the name Eugene Zarashaw and has worked as an engineering director at Meta. He has 9-plus years of experience as per his LinkedIn profile. The other is Steven Elia, whose LinkedIn profile says that he is a software engineering manager with 11 years of experience at Facebook.
The questioning took place in March 2022 during a court hearing related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018. Though the engineers were questioned in March, the transcript of the court hearing got unsealed only recently, as per the report.
Daniel Garrie, a court-appointed technical expert, led the questioning. Garrie wished to know where exactly was the user data kept among “some 55 Facebook subsystems”
“I’m just trying to understand at the most basic level from this list what we’re looking at,” Garrie reportedly said.
To which Eugene Zarashow replied: “I don’t believe there’s a single person that exists who could answer that question. It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question.”
“When asked about how Facebook might track down every bit of data associated with a given user account, Zarashaw was stumped again: “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the — where the data flows. I would be surprised if there’s even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively.” says the report
What Meta has to say
Meta emailed The Intercept its statement where spokesperson Dina El-Kassaby told the publication that “a single engineer’s inability to know where all user data was stored came as no surprise.”
“We have made — and continue making — significant investments to meet our privacy commitments and obligations, including extensive data controls.”, she added.
The veteran engineer goes by the name Eugene Zarashaw and has worked as an engineering director at Meta. He has 9-plus years of experience as per his LinkedIn profile. The other is Steven Elia, whose LinkedIn profile says that he is a software engineering manager with 11 years of experience at Facebook.
The questioning took place in March 2022 during a court hearing related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018. Though the engineers were questioned in March, the transcript of the court hearing got unsealed only recently, as per the report.
Daniel Garrie, a court-appointed technical expert, led the questioning. Garrie wished to know where exactly was the user data kept among “some 55 Facebook subsystems”
“I’m just trying to understand at the most basic level from this list what we’re looking at,” Garrie reportedly said.
To which Eugene Zarashow replied: “I don’t believe there’s a single person that exists who could answer that question. It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question.”
“When asked about how Facebook might track down every bit of data associated with a given user account, Zarashaw was stumped again: “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the — where the data flows. I would be surprised if there’s even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively.” says the report
What Meta has to say
Meta emailed The Intercept its statement where spokesperson Dina El-Kassaby told the publication that “a single engineer’s inability to know where all user data was stored came as no surprise.”
“We have made — and continue making — significant investments to meet our privacy commitments and obligations, including extensive data controls.”, she added.
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