Facebook staff 'accessed user passwords'
Baku, July 18 (AZERTAC). Mark Zuckerberg's former speechwriter Katherine Losse has reportedly warned that Facebook employees had access to data including user passwordsn an interview with the Guardian, Losse said that when she joined Facebook in 2005, customer support staff were each handed a “master password,” which allowed them to log in as any Facebook user and access all their messages and data.
She said that staff needed to have access to accounts in order to manage and repair user issues, claiming that it was common practice at the time for early-stage startups to give their staff access to customers’ personal information.
As many Facebook users use the same password for multiple accounts elsewhere on the internet, this raises significant security concerns.
However, Losse admitted that more secure forms of logging in to repair accounts have since been implemented, and Facebook has since confirmed that the social network now has “very, very strict processes” in place to control access to passwords and user information.
“Facebook is very highly regulated and places great importance on the integrity of the information people choose to add to it,” a source close to the company told the Telegraph.Only two types of employees have access to user accounts - the user operations team, which works behind the scenes when issues are reported on Facebook, and the security team, which deals with bullying and harassment. However, this access is carefully controlled and logged on a daily basis.
A recent audit by the Irish Data Protection Commission found that Facebook has “an appropriate framework to ensure that all access to user data is on a need to know basis”.
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