Facebook Employee Fired Over Abuse Of Privileges

As a company that seems to be involved in scandals stemming from the abuse of its privileged access to user data, Facebook is no stranger to criticisms over how deep it set its hooks into people’s lives. It is even known to stalk users across the web to learn about their browsing patterns. Recently, the social network fired an employee for using the same tactics, albeit for much more personal reasons than financial ones.

The name of the employee was not revealed but the termination was done following investigations by Jackie Stokes, a cybersecurity expert, Business Insider reports. After looking into the matter, Stokes discovered that a Facebook engineer was using his privileges to stalk women on Tinder. She even posted screenshots of conversations that supposedly took place where the engineer admits to stalking.

Mere hours after this particular piece of information was given to Facebook, the social network looked into the situation and decided to terminate the employment of the engineer. According to a statement by a chief security officer at Facebook, Alex Stamos, the reason for the termination was the social network’s intolerance for abuse of privileges.

"It’s important that people’s information is kept secure and private when they use Facebook. It’s why we have strict policy controls and technical restrictions so employees only access the data they need to do their jobs — for example to fix bugs, manage customer support issues or respond to valid legal requests. Employees who abuse these controls will be fired," the statement reads.

At this point, the specifics as to how the abuse was actually taking place have not been revealed, which is concerning. If an employee at the social media company can just access that kind of information whenever they want, users have the right to know how those details are even getting accessed. Those who don’t want to be stalked might want to make some changes to prevent similar incidents in the future.