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Comment by chuckgreenman | Hacker News Reader

There's a paragraph here where they talk about reviewing private messenger conversations between interns after they didn't show up for work one day.

That feels pretty invasive. Facebook tried to couch it in "genuine concern" for their safety. I'm not sure that holds water with anyone who's familiar with the workplace culture inside Facebook.

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On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. At least, that was the case when I was there, I can’t think it has changed. I’m assuming this has to do with a lot of well documented legal reasons (insider trading, sexual harassment, etc.) De facto, hardly any conversation goes through email: salary, pension, that kind of things almost exclusively. Project progress, being cancelled, blockers, all that goes through an internal version of Facebook (now Workplace, when I was there, a subset of the main Facebook). It made sense that all that is deemed work product for the company.

I would be more surprised if they had access to conversation with outsiders.

On the “genuine concern”, I joined several months after Snowden’s revelations. The security team was (and I’m assuming still is) very aware that State agents might try to access employee credentials. Overall, the company is very considerate for employees, typically no matter the cost (e.g. the freezing eggs things) and quite conscious to respect boundaries--but I would expect that a small chance that a hostile Nation state escalated to kidnapping employees is a stretch but not a big one. I’m a little surprised because the company prides itself on not judging, and actually doesn’t care much about time spent in the office. Interns might be given a shorter lead there.

With E2E encryption introduced to Messenger since a lot of that could have changed.

> On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed. At least, that was the case when I was there, I can’t think it has changed.

Do Facebook employees have separate Facebook accounts for work? My impression was that they don't, but I could be wrong.

If they're forced to use their "personal" account for work-related functions, I think that raises all kinds of privacy concerns that probably should negate the principle that employer ownership authorizes monitoring.

They do need a FB account to access all internal systems, but that can be a seperate account from their private one

> They do need a FB account to access all internal systems, but that can be a seperate account from their private one

Is there an exception in the TOS for that? It's my understanding that they forbid regular users from creating multiple accounts, though enforcement of the rules is pretty ineffective.

https://www.facebook.com/help/975828035803295?helpref=uf_per...

That rule is strictly enforced for employees. It is meant to avoid fake accounts. The work accounts (known as Workplace accounts) are created on a separate service and namespace. They are clearly considered distinct. You can toggle between them when authenticating, not unlike Google and Google for Business.

The particularity of Facebook is that the service emerged from internal use, so Facebook internal (a subset of the main Facebook) was (or is) tied to Facebook Workplace. The technical implementation was… hacky when I was there. I hope it’s cleaner now.

Every company that uses the service has a service that is clearly distinct from Facebook (with black rather than blue branding). I’ve worked for four client companies with their own, including two (subsidiary) at the same time, so I have my own personal account, the Facebook Workplace account is deactivated but my comments are still visible internally; three more deactivated accounts and my current one. I used to have to toggle between three accounts and that was rather seemless.

I doubt it's multiple accounts on the exact same service. I'm guessing fb.com is a near-clone of facebook.com's codebase, personal accounts are facebook.com accounts, and work accounts are fb.com accounts.

Maybe it's a separate database, but cloning the code is a terrible idea.

Employee's != regular users

>On that particular aspect: all Facebook employees (and I believe interns) when they write on Messenger to other employees have an on-screen reminder that their conversations are considered work product and can be monitored or reviewed.

Were they limiting themselves to the internal tools? I got the impression they could have used personal FB accounts.

Hearsay from folks I know at FB - you use your personal account at work. There's no work account/personal account split.

That would be consistent with everything I've seen from them as a developer. One of the most common recurring requests on the Facebook Developers Facebook Group is when someone has all of their privileges for app development on the FB API revoked because Facebook found they were using a second "company account" or "developer account" for managing their app. Facebook sees those as "fake accounts" which are prohibited under their policy/TOS. You get only one account for anything personal or business-related, and doing otherwise risks having everything thrown into the black hole of "everything has been revoked, and no human will tell me why or how to fix it"

This seems insane, how is a large company that has any sort of employee churn supposed to maintain something on Facebook? Your inevitably chasing former employees to get access to stuff your company built for the platform...

The idea is that you don't link your company stuff to an individual user account with a single username/password that gets shared - you link your company stuff to a Page, and list multiple people with their own accounts as Page admins

Sounds like a great way for 1 angry employee to hijack a Facebook page.

This is incorrect, employees have a workplace account for work.

To clarify, it used to be the case that you used your personal account for work, but facebook now uses their enterprise "workplace" version of facebook internally. The accounts are still linked, but silo-ed in such a way that you can't use them interchangeably.

Interesting, I guess I assumed there would be some sort of internal Slack like application for work related communications.

The article (or atleast my reading of it) made it seem like these were straight up standard fb messenger chats.

And here we go again, do you feel surprised that Slack admin can read all private slack messages sent between the members?

When will Facebook bashing stop. It's well within FB right to read their employees evil scheming tricks.

Learn to read mate, I was clearly referring to facebook messenger chats, a product, while used for work at Facebook is used privately by the vast majority of folks.

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