Dialogs about the Internet: Facebook

This translation was made at the personal request of deniskin , the author’s vocabulary is fully preserved, and obscene language is present in the text.

Facebook employees know the price of privacy better than most .

Last summer, Facebook moved from University Avenue in Palo Alto, California, to its new headquarters at Stanford Research Park. For two years, my good friend and Facebook employee invited me to evaluate the new workspace. When I arrived at the place, the guard provided my signature with a non-disclosure agreement - a mandatory requirement for everyone who enters the building. “We need to make sure you're not a twitter spy,” he added. For this reason, I can’t describe the tour that my friend and I did, however, photographs of the new office can be found on the Internet. After this walk, we went for a drink in Dutch Goose- A bar popular with techies and Stanford alumni, where most of this conversation took place. My friend was very concerned about his anonymity: Facebook employees, after all, better than most understand the true value of privacy. Since she is not allowed to divulge the secrets of the company, and she wants to continue to work on Facebook, we omitted her name in this interview. It provides the reader with an interesting retrospective of how the work environment looked and the atmosphere of the company in the summer of 2009.

- On your servers, you save any information ever entered on Facebook, regardless of whether it was deleted by the user, or tags were removed from it, etc.?
- At the moment, this is absolutely true. The only reason we change this setting is the speed of work. Making any interaction with Facebook - uploading a photo, viewing someone’s profile, updating status, changing profile information - everything is saved.

- When you say “looking at someone’s profile”, do you mean that you keep the pageview history?
- Yes. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But this is public information - we separately stated that we store such data. If you look in the search on the main page of Facebook, where you enter the letter “A”, or any other letter, the list of best friends will come out. This list is not sorted by the name of all friends, showing only those profiles with which you interact most - your "best friends" or those whom we considered as such.

- In other words, will I see a person whose profile I follow most of all the others?
“Not only that matters.” We also look at messages, uploaded files, shared photos, along with how often you view someone’s profile. In fact, we just check how “good friends” you are.

- When did Facebook accept these changes?
- This happened relatively recently, somewhere over the past three months. But besides this, we save snapshots, which represent an overall picture of all the data on each of our servers. I want to say that we do this every hour, every day of the week, every week of every month.

- That is, this is visual information about each?
“Again, not only that.” Or, more precisely, not quite that. We save all the information entered from each computer into each profile. Therefore, if we save your photos, we have them stored in six versions. We do not save the originals, making six different versions when uploading photos, and downloading them immediately in such numbers.

- And the difference between them will be in size and zoom in specific areas?
- Exactly. Different sizes of photos for your tape, your profile, enlarged thumbnails, etc.

- And all this settles on the servers in your office?
- No, not in our office, absolutely not. We have four data centers around the world. One in Santa Clara, one in San Francisco, another in New York and one in London. Each of them has approximately 5000-8000 servers. Each colocation server stores the same data as the original.

- How many users do you have today?
“The number that I can divulge?” From two hundred to two hundred and twenty million.

“ But really?”
- This is the number of active users. As for the total number of accounts, including potentially false, deactivated and any others, we have long exceeded 300 million. And two hundred twenty million are users who logged in at least once and performed some actions within the last 30 days.

-You said that you are changing the policy of maintaining information .
- Not. No one has ever changed this policy. We still retain all information. When I said this, for that matter, I meant that we are starting to delete more photos due to increased productivity. We are the largest distributor of photographs in the world.

- Really? It is obvious?
- I can’t name specific numbers from my head, but I want to note that literally trillions of photos are stored on the servers, each of which has six copies. It is like finding a needle in a hay stock. When we need to load a web page in half a second, we need to find the output of thousands of photos - think about your feed - at a time, instantly. This is hard enough to do.

-In the past, you mentioned a master password that is no longer used .
“I'm not sure when they got rid of him, but we really had such a password for some purposes.” It worked as follows: you had to enter any user ID and master password. I will not give an exact password, I can only say that with capital and lowercase letters, numbers and everything else, it read like “Chuck Norris”. That was funny enough.

- Was it available to every Facebook employee?
- Technically, yes. But its use was severely limited by the original engineers, because they were the only people who knew him. It has never been that some people from the HR department used this password to gain access to someone’s profile. The password was created and used only by engineers. But if the employee knew where to look, he could find him.
It is worth noting here that the use of the password was limited to the office of the company. If I wanted to use this password in the library, or at the university, nothing would have happened. You need to be inside Facebook, and use Facebook ISP.

- Are there cases when Facebook employees enjoyed the privilege of universal access?
- I do not know if this happened in the past, because at least two were fired for this reason.

- What did they do?
- I know that one of them used the data of another person, changing his religious views or something like that. I don’t remember when the exact thing happened, but he was surrendered, found, and fired.

- Have you ever logged in with someone else's account?
- I had to. For programming purposes only.

- Have you ever done this for unprofessional reasons?
- I will say this - when I was just starting to work there, yes. I used the master password to view other people's profiles for which I did not have permissions to view normally. I never changed any data, however, I violated the permission to view profiles several times when I first started working on Facebook.

- How about reading posts in these profiles?
- Never that way. I just looked at the profiles.

- Is it possible to assume that some Facebook employees read someone’s correspondence in this way?
- You see, what’s the matter here - I don’t know how much you know about it, but all the information is stored in the back-end DB. Literally, all. This means that all messages are deleted there, deleted or not. So I can just give a query on the database, and it’s easy to see all (absolutely) your messages, and I don’t need to log in to do this. This is not understood by all people.

- That is, the master password, in general, is not needed?
- Yeah.

- Is it just for style?
- Exactly. But it is no longer used. As I said, there have been some changes recently, and the password has been replaced by a very cool tool. For example, if I visited your profile on our private network, there is a “Switch login” button. I click it, explain the reason why I log into your account, click "OK" and I - you. This can always be done if you have an explanation, and it would be better if you had it. For example, if someone is investigating a question of a compromised account, then he needs to be logged into this account.

- Do your bosses really fidget every time you log in to someone else’s account?
“No, but if something happens, it’s better to be able to justify yourself.” Otherwise, you will be fired.

- I think they relate to this ...
- Very seriously.

- You have come up with the position of Chief Officer for this. Chris Kelly, right?
- That's right, Chris Kelly - Chie Privacy Officer. He now works as the Attorney General of California.

“ Is that a standard position in Silicon Valley web companies?”
- I think that such a position is increasingly being used by many companies, especially Web 2.0, 3.0, where the development model is to collect as much information as possible. In such a situation, someone should go back and make sure that the information is kept confidential, at least the amount that we are able to contribute.

- F acebook sets trends in this regard, right?
- In my opinion, we always provided the most applicable privacy settings in real life, from the very beginning. There is no other site that would be equally customizable.

- Could you provide us with your vision of several recent files, such as Facebook Beacon and recent contradictions in the Terms of Service?
- It is always very difficult to evaluate how the user community will respond. Until recently, for example, we simply did not have a good enough beta testing system. When you have a group of twenty engineers working on a project, they think that this is the most beautiful, the best thing that has happened to the world, and finally they finish the development, and the project manager approves of it, launching it. So this worked until recently - we rolled out something, and if users did not like it, we removed the changes. This was our philosophy - one attempt at one mistake. Now we are conducting psychological tests, starting ...

- Really?
- Of course. Are you laughing at me? We use eye-track technology to know where you are looking while you are on Facebook.

- What do you mean by eye-track?
- For example, when we want to add some new features, such as when we changed the view of the photo album, you know that when you click “Next” over the photo and stay on the same page, except that the photo changes. We tested and found that such an innovation increases the number of page views by 77%, mainly because we removed 77% of the page load, so they began to work faster and generate more clicks. Having done this, we not only narrowed our channel, thus saving on the money we pay for it, but also made the whole site faster by adding a few more values ​​to the “clicks per minute” parameter - and this is exactly what we were interested in .

-In other words, do you monitor behavior by analyzing non-obvious parameters even for the user himself?
- We track everything. Every photo you look at, every person you mark, every post on the wall, and so on.

“ Maybe you know that, maybe not.” There is a certain paradox with the international expansion of the company: definitely all Internet companies wishing to enter the international market, such as service providers entering the territory of a new country, and lacking a powerful infrastructure there, as in some third world countries, are forced to build such an infrastructure themselves, and the result is a situation in which the business practically does not bring significant revenue from advertising.
“I know absolutely nothing about that.” The only comment I can make on this subject is that we are definitely continuing to expand in third world countries. Take Iran as an example, although it is not a third world country - when elections began, and then disputes, we found that people use Facebook as an organization’s tool, and as an information tool in order to convey their dissatisfaction with the government. Therefore, we publicly transferred the entire site to Farsi within 36 hours. It was the second language that is written from right to left, and it was quite complicated for us. Literally, the entire site is mirrored. We did everything in 36 hours, more than 20 translators were hired, together with whom the engineers worked on the clock to roll everything out as quickly as possible - to be honest, we ourselves were slightly surprised. The number of daily registrations has grown 3 times since the day we rolled out this language version, and continued to grow. So we still take all countries very seriously. The bottom line is that we have such a huge market share in Europe, Australia, Mexico, the USA and Canada that over the next 5-10 years, 99.9% of our advertising revenue will come from there. Therefore, the fact that we penetrate other markets rather means that we give you the opportunity to communicate with your friends and relatives, wherever they are. This is the ultimate goal. that we have such a huge market share in Europe, Australia, Mexico, the USA and Canada, that over the next 5-10 years, 99.9% of our advertising revenue will come from there. Therefore, the fact that we penetrate other markets rather means that we give you the opportunity to communicate with your friends and relatives, wherever they are. This is the ultimate goal. that we have such a huge market share in Europe, Australia, Mexico, the USA and Canada, that over the next 5-10 years, 99.9% of our advertising revenue will come from there. Therefore, the fact that we penetrate other markets rather means that we give you the opportunity to communicate with your friends and relatives, wherever they are. This is the ultimate goal.

- The strangest story that happened to you on Facebook?
- Well, the strangest one was just the one I had to work on, and this was just the situation when I needed to log into someone else's account. This guy wrote a letter to my school friend in a very strange letter, referring to “Caitlin” (this is the name of her friend) and “poop”. Literally, this was one of the strangest things I've seen in my life: a two-page message about the semantic connection of the name “Caitlin” and the word “poop”. We found that this guy sent the same message to about two hundred Kathleen, whom he found in a search on Facebook.

- This is strange.
- Yes indeed. Out of nowhere, for no reason. He began to send this message to twenty Caitlin in a day, for about three weeks.

- And this is the most?
“I found a fake account created in Berkeley that used a profile picture and information about the brother of one of my very good friends.” We looked at the one who created the original profile, and it turned out that these two people have never heard of each other, and of course, are not familiar. But he added him as a friend, and the second accepted the offer of friendship. The first one stole all the information from the profile of the second, created a fake account, and talked to himself from this fake account. He wrote to his wall, and answered these messages to the “second”. We found that this guy had about fifteen fake accounts, and he used real information and photos of other people to create even more accounts, communicating with himself on the network. Just to make "yourself real" more cool in the eyes of your friends.

“ A bad example of humanity .”
“This is the strangest example that comes to my mind.” In both of these cases, one question popped into my head: “What the hell is going on?”

“ Then tell me about the engineers .”
“They are strange, and smart.” For example, there is one guy who rewrites, literally, the whole site in two hands. Facebook is written, I would say 90% in PHP. The entire front-end, everything you see, is generated using a language called PHP. He creates HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means, literally, that he rewrites the whole language. This is the difference between writing in a scripted language, or a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted programming language. A computer, or browser, reads the program as a script, from top to bottom, and performs it in the same order: everything that is said below cannot be applied to the top. The situation with the compiled language is different - the program you write is compiled into an executable file. No need to read the program from start to finish in order to execute the command. And it is much faster. So, this engineer, changes the whole site so that it stops working in the script language, and starts working in the compilation language. Nevertheless, if you want to go and discuss with him ... basketball, then perhaps you will have the strangest dialogue of all that you had to conduct in your life. You just can’t communicate with these people at a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, better discuss graph theory. He will understand. And a lot of these people. But no one but them can do the job. If you wanted to talk about basketball, better discuss graph theory. He will understand. And a lot of these people. But no one but them can do the job. If you wanted to talk about basketball, better discuss graph theory. He will understand. And a lot of these people. But no one but them can do the job.

- What will be the final effect of the transition to Hyper PHP?
- We will reduce the CPU utilization of our servers by 80%, in practice this will mean that the user will notice the acceleration of the site. Pages will load in the fifth of the time they need today.

- When will it be in practice?
- When will be ready. I think the coming months.

- Where do these geeks come from?
- I would say that about 70% of Facebook engineers are from Harvard or Stanford.

- Wow. I know that Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, but what's the connection with Stanford? Besides the fact that it’s all Palo Alto .
- I think it’s not worth talking about the fact that Stanford is the number 1 computer science branch in the world.

“ Did Stanford engineers build Silicon Valley ?”
“They did it.”

- How has the recent relocation affected the company?
“We just moved to offices at Stanford Research Park, where HP started its roots.” Before that, everything was less centralized; we had seven or eight offices in the city center.

- Changes in the atmosphere after moving?
“It's great to have everyone at hand in the same office.” Previously, most meetings were not very convenient. I mean, the whole development was divided into three different offices, and it was a lot of pain. Now there is more unity, information is faster, everyone feels “their own”, everything is super-friendly. I think the best change in setting is a growing confidence. I don’t care what, who, where, when, as long as you do your job. If you want to work in a bar, in a stadium, in a park, on the roof - nobody cares. Just do your job. You see it for yourself - you and I have been sitting here for so long, but when I return to the office, I know that I need to finish my work. Always like this. And everyone understands this. Everyone needs to return and finish their work, even if this happens late at night.

-I'm sorry that we drank so much beer :)
- We were able to do this - there is no need to worry. You can live a personal life while you have time to do all the work.