For those of you who remain, I hope you stay vigilant

September 22, 2024 2:26 AM

The scary thing is how quickly you get desensitized to it all. At first, I told myself it was just a mistake. That no company as big as Meta could intentionally undermine its own users like this. But after working on React, I’ve seen enough behind the curtain to know that ethical concerns are an afterthought. Every feature, every decision is driven by how much data they can mine, how much deeper they can integrate into your life, and how they can manipulate you to stay online just a little longer. from Why I’m leaving Meta by Christopher Chedeau [Medium; ungated]
posted by chavenet (18 comments total)

I have heard, anecdotally, that at this point, having Facebook on your résumé in a lot of places might as well say “worked on the Joe Camel ad campaign.”
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:45 AM on September 22, 2024 [5 favorites]

Let me be clear: Meta isn’t what it seems on the surface. Sure, they champion innovation, tout their open-source contributions, and market themselves as a company that connects the world. But behind closed doors, a very different picture emerges — one that’s deeply troubling, morally questionable, and frankly, terrifying for anyone who values privacy, transparency, and ethics.

My guy, this is not news to anyone. Anyone but you, it seems.

Few if any have thought that Meta nee Facebook was anything but overtly evil for well over a decade, and longer for anyone paying attention. Have we all forgotten the emotional contagion experiment? Or Cambridge Analytica?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:53 AM on September 22, 2024 [17 favorites]

Or that Facebook put the last nail in the coffin of email netiquette by weaponizing the Joe Job to build an initial user base?
posted by flabdablet at 3:17 AM on September 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

Apparently it is a fake: according to the purported author.
But it is an account with a blue check on xitter so it could go either ways.

Which does not take away from the dumpster fire that is Facebook/Meta.
posted by techSupp0rt at 3:41 AM on September 22, 2024 [4 favorites]

Apparently it is a fake: according to the purported author.

That is ... wild. And "meta."
posted by chavenet at 4:01 AM on September 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

I'm a little confused by For this post, I'm setting aside all sexual and stalking-related conflicts with Sophie Alpert.
posted by kozad at 4:30 AM on September 22, 2024 [4 favorites]

How curious. A vigilante post using his name, a plausible denial after a call from his lawyer, or is Chedeau morbin' out on medium at night?
posted by lucidium at 4:37 AM on September 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

For this post, I set aside all sexual and stalking-related conflicts with Sophie Alpert.

This sentence raises many questions that are not answered, such as "huh?" and "what?" and "what the hell??"
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:59 AM on September 22, 2024 [5 favorites]

Came here to say this must be fake. It’s written like an LLM was instructed to compose a resignation letter insinuating dark and mysterious … reasons.
posted by simra at 5:03 AM on September 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

A Hacker News post where Chedeau says this is fake, and that his Hacker News account was hacked to post it.

There's also a comment, from before he disclaimed it, guessing that it was fake because it doesn't match his style and wasn't posted where he posts.

And it's a weird article -- there's zero details on the "back door," which just sounds like how computers work, combined with two very specific callouts of women's names.

My vote (as someone who stopped using Facebook) is this is fake, and created for some gross reason.
posted by john hadron collider at 5:05 AM on September 22, 2024 [9 favorites]

The supposed author's actual website is here; the fact that he didn't post it on his existing blog, combined with the HN posts, make me think that someone's gone to a lot of effort to make an elaborate fake. My assumption is that it's intended to do reputational damage to everyone named - people have already noted how weird the callouts are.

The "backdoor" described doesn't really make sense as explained, and it appears to confuse Meta's frontend (where your personal information is already Meta's property, and any "backdoor" is meaningless) and a backdoor into React that would let Meta see "your" personal data. But React isn't a technology that end users know about! If Meta had a backdoor that could see all my users' personal information if I built my frontend using React, then that would be deeply alarming, but you'd claim that instead, if the person who's writing this actually knew what they were talking about.
posted by Merus at 5:40 AM on September 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

Soooo…The first AI to resign from its job? Sentience achieved!
posted by Thorzdad at 5:41 AM on September 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Sow, reap.
posted by flabdablet at 5:58 AM on September 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Huh. Okay, this is a fake, but have I misunderstood something about the internet all along? Wouldn't Meta have access to all user data all the time and that's just the price of the ticket that most people don't fully grasp that they are paying? I would never have expected that any information anyone provide to Meta was in any way secret or ultimately inaccessible, unless there's some specific types of information that Meta is required by law to sequester, and even there, I would not expect it to be truly safe.

I will admit that on a first read-through I was surprised by how rudimentary and badly written it was and surprised that someone who wrote that way could have risen to a fancy internet job - I can believe that someone could be a terrible writer, or a minimally competent writer, and have a fancy job requiring lots of intelligence, but I can't believe they'd be a terrible writer in that way.
posted by Frowner at 6:32 AM on September 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

have I misunderstood something about the internet all along?

Possibly the part about not believing everything you read on it :-)
posted by flabdablet at 6:55 AM on September 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Okay, this is a fake, but have I misunderstood something about the internet all along? Wouldn't Meta have access to all user data all the time and that's just the price of the ticket that most people don't fully grasp that they are paying?

My understanding, from having colleagues who’ve worked at large social media companies, is that user data is accessible to the company but mostly not accessible to individual employees. E.g., a software engineer might write code that can scan user data to optimize ad placement across thousands of users, but they are never personally allowed to look at individual people’s data because it’s not needed for their job.

This (fake?) post’s claims about a secret “backdoor” are weird, but I suppose it could read as a way to bypass internal controls that prevent that kind of personal viewing of private content. …

Except not, because they dismiss the claims that “performance monitoring” is a valid use case for data access, and that sounds very much like an automated system rather than a way for individual engineers to be creeps.

I dunno, it’s a weird post. Seems likely to be fake.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 7:08 AM on September 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

If it's not fake, it's a pretty convincing fake fake.
posted by flabdablet at 7:37 AM on September 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Fake; it plays into the existing paranoia around fb/meta, and yet provides no detail about the supposed backdoor.
posted by The River Ivel at 8:01 AM on September 22, 2024 [2 favorites]