Facebook doesn’t know what happens to user data: Internal document suggests

The social media group Meta and its subsidiary Facebook apparently have largely no idea what happens internally to the user data collected by the various services. This is according to an internal report from Facebook. Like the American magazine motherboard reports, an internal report has been received on what is happening with the massive amounts of data Facebook collects about its users.

The document comes from Facebook’s Ad and Business Product team and was written back in 2021. It wonders how Facebook can respond to the new privacy policy being rolled out in Europe, India, South Africa, and many other countries. According to the document, in most cases, it is not known what actually happens to the personal data of nearly two billion Facebook users.

Internal systems exchange all data

The main problem is the fact that the internal systems work “boundless”, i.e. Facebook’s user data is stored with information from third-party sources and various other important personal data without distinction between the data sources and data types. It is said that it is practically impossible to keep certain data sets separate. Basically, Facebook’s problem is that you “pour ink from a bottle into a lake without knowing how to get the ink back into the bottle,” the paper’s authors said in an effort to clarify the situation.

Handling the data was “a single disaster to put it bluntly,” one Facebook employee explained to colleagues. The company commented on the report with a denial, saying the document does not provide information on how Facebook is trying to meet its requirements for protecting the privacy of its users around the world through various processes and measures. In principle, therefore, it could not be said that the guidelines were not complied with.