Internet conversations: Facebook

This translation was done at the personal request of deniskin 'a, the author’s vocabulary is fully preserved, the text contains obscene language.

Facebook workers know the price of privacy better than most .

Last summer, Facebook moved from University Avenue to Palo Alto, California, to a new central office at Stanford Research Park. My good friend and Facebook employee for two years invited me to evaluate a new workspace. When I arrived at the scene, the guard provided a non-disclosure agreement for my signature - a mandatory requirement for everyone who enters the building. “We need to make sure that you are not a Twitter spy,” he added. For this reason, I cannot describe the tour that my friend and I have made, however, photos 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 own anonymity: Facebook employees, after all, understand the true value of confidentiality better than most. Since she is not allowed to disclose company secrets, and she wants to continue working 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.
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- On your servers, do you save any information ever entered into Facebook, regardless of whether it was deleted by the user, or tags were removed from it, etc.?
- At the moment it is absolutely true. The only reason we change this setting is the speed of work. Doing any interaction with Facebook — uploading photos, 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 save the history of page views?
- Yes. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But this is public information - we separately stated that we save such data. If you look in the search on the main Facebook page, where you enter the letter "A", or any other letter, a 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 of all - your “best friends” or those whom we considered as such.

- In other words, I will see the person whose profile I follow more than anyone else?
- Not only does it matter. We also look at messages, uploaded files, sharing photos, along with how often you look at someone’s profile. In fact, we just check how "good friends" you are.

- When did Facebook accept these changes?
- It happened relatively recently, somewhere in the past three months. But besides this, we save images that represent a general 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.

- So this is visual information about each?
- Again - not only that. Or rather, not quite that. We store all the information entered from each computer in each profile. Therefore, if we save your photos, they are stored in six versions. We do not save the originals, making six different versions when uploading photos, and downloading them immediately in such quantity.

- And the difference between them will be in size and zoom for specific areas?
- Exactly. Different photo sizes 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 about 5000-8000 servers. Each collocation server stores the same data as the original one.

- How many users do you have today?
- The figure that I can disclose? From two hundred to two hundred and twenty million.

- And really?
- This is the number of active users. As to the total number of accounts, including potentially fake, deactivated, and any other, we have long passed for 300 million. And two hundred and twenty million are users who have logged in at least once and have done something in the past 30 days.

- You said that you are changing the retention policy .
- Not. No one has ever changed this policy. We still save all the information. When I said this, for that matter, I meant that we are starting to delete more photos due to an increase in performance. We are the largest distributor of photos in the world.

- Really? It is obvious?
- I can not name specific figures from the head, but I want to note that the servers are literally trillions of photos, each of which has six copies. This is like finding a needle in a stock of hay. When we need to load a web page in half a second, we need to find thousands of photos output — think about your tape — in one go, instantly. It is quite difficult to do.

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

- Was it available to every Facebook employee?
- Technically - yes. But its use was severely limited by the original engineers, since they were the only people who knew him. There has never been such that some people from the HR department used this password to gain access to someone's profile. The password was created, and was used, only by engineers. But if the worker knew where to look, he could find him.
It is worth noting that the use of a password was limited to the company's office. 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.

- Is it known about cases when Facebook employees enjoyed the privilege of universal access?
- I don’t know if this happened in the past, because at least two people 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 do not remember when this happened exactly, but he was handed over, found, and fired.

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

- Have you ever done this for unprofessional reasons?
- I will say this - when I first started working 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 messages in these profiles?
- Never in this way. I just looked at the profiles.

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

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

- Is it just for style?
- Right. But it is no longer used. As I already said, there have been some changes lately, and the password has been replaced with very cool tools. For example, if I visited your profile on our private network, there is a “Switch login” button. I click it, explain the reason for which I log in to your account, click "OK" and I - you. You can always do this if you have an explanation, and you'd better have it. For example, if someone investigates a compromised account, he needs to be logged in to this account.

- Do your bosses really fidget every time when you log into someone else's account?
- No, but if something happens, it is 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 California Attorney General.

Is this a standard position in Silicon Valley web companies?
- I think that such a position is becoming more and more common in many companies, especially Web 2.0, 3.0, where the development model is to gather as much information as possible. In such a situation, someone should go back and make sure that the confidentiality of information is preserved, at least that amount we can contribute.

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

- Will you provide us with your vision of several recent files, such as the Facebook Beacon and the recent contradictions in the Terms of Service?
- It is always very difficult to assess 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 it, putting it into motion. So it worked until recently - we were rolling out something, and if users didn’t like it, we removed the changes. This was our philosophy - one attempt at one mistake. Now we are conducting psychological analyzes, starting ...

- Really?
- Of course. Are you laughing at me? We use eye-track technology to know where you look 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, this is when you click “Next” above the photo, and stay on the same page, except that the photo changes. We tested and found that this 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 follow the behavior by analyzing non-obvious parameters even for the user himself?
- We track everything. Every photo you see, 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 not having powerful infrastructure there, as in some third world countries, have to build such infrastructure themselves, and the result is a situation in which the business practically does not generate significant advertising revenue.
“I know absolutely nothing about it.” The only comment I can make on this topic concerns the fact that we are definitely continuing to expand in the third world countries. Take Iran as an example, although it is not a third-world country — when elections began there and then disputes, we discovered that people use Facebook as tools of organization, and information tool to bring their own discontent to the government. Therefore, we publicly translated the entire site to Farsi within 36 hours. It was a second language, which is written from right to left, and it was rather complicated for us. Literally - the whole site is mirrored. We carried out everything in 36 hours, more than 20 translators were hired, with whom engineers worked in hours to roll out everything as quickly as possible - to be honest, we ourselves were slightly surprised. The number of daily registrations has increased 3 times since the day we rolled out this language version, and continued to grow. So we still take all countries very seriously. The essence is that we have such a huge market share in Europe, Australia, Mexico, the USA and Canada that over the next 5-10 years, it will be from there that 99.9% of our advertising revenue will come. Therefore, the fact that we penetrate other markets rather means that we enable you to communicate with your friends and relatives, wherever they may be. This is the ultimate goal.

- The most strange story that happened to you on Facebook?
- Well, the strangest was exactly the one I had to work on, and this was exactly the situation when I had to log in to someone else's account. This guy wrote a letter to my school friend a very strange letter, referring to "Caitlin" (this is the name of a friend), and "poop." Literally, this was one of the strangest things I saw 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 weird.
- Yes indeed. Out of nowhere, for no reason. He began sending this message to twenty Kaitlin in a day, for about three weeks.

- And this is the very thing?
“I discovered a fake account created in Berkeley, which 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 had never heard of each other, and of course, they did not know each other. 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 one, created a fake account, and communicated with himself from this fake account. He wrote himself on the wall, and responded to these messages to the “second one”. 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 within this network with himself. Only in order to make "yourself present" more cool in the eyes of their friends.

- A bad example of humanity .
- This is the most strange example that comes to my mind. In both of these cases, one question appeared in my head: “What the hell is going on?”

“ Then tell me about the engineers .”
- They are weird and smart. For example, there is one guy who literally rewrites the entire site in two hands. Facebook is written, I would say, 90% PHP. The whole front-end, everything you see, is generated using a language called PHP. He creates HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means, literally, that he rewrites the entire language. This is the difference between writing in a scripted language or a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted programming language. The 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 refer to the top. With a compiled language, the situation is different - the program you are writing 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 entire site so that he stops working in the language of the script, and starts working in the language of compilations. However, if you want to go and discuss with him ... basketball, then perhaps you will have the most strange dialogue of all that you had to lead in your life. Just can not communicate with these people at a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, better discuss the theory of graphs. He will understand. And a lot of these people. But no one except them can do this work.

- 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 be loaded for the fifth part of the time they need today.

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

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

- Wow. I know that Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, but what's the connection with Stanford? Except that all this is Palo Alto .
- I think we should not say that Stanford is the number 1 computer science department in the world.

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

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

- Changes in the atmosphere after the move?
- It's great to have everyone at your side in the same office. Previously, most of the meetings were not very comfortable. I mean, the whole development was divided into three different offices, and it was a lot of pain. Now there is more unity, information passes faster, everyone feels “his”, everything is super friendly. I think that the best change in setting is increasing trust. Do not care what, who, where, when, as long as you manage your business. If you want to work in a bar, in a stadium, in a park, on the roof - everyone doesn't care. Just do your job. You see it 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 come back and finish his work, let it happen in the middle of the night.

- I am sorry that we drank so much beer :)
- We were able to do it - no need to worry. You can live a personal life while you manage to do all the work.