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Multiple employees were fired for accessing private data in the past. I suspect that it is a serious taboo at the company now to even joke about it.

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That seems way to risky to me. You basically have to watch server logs for some interesting patterns. And of course, if they're smart they simply oversubscribe in a query (or temporally space out a query), and then pinpoint the data they are looking for locally.

Given they have 2000+ employees this is just a process that is looking to be constantly abused. I surely don't expect people aren't talking about it, but I'm nearly as confident that it is happening in a way that most people aren't aware of. No evidence, but again, I've seen people do worse, with less access.

So what you're saying is that now anybody can still do it, but everybody knows not to talk about it.

I'm gathering that this will never change.

Whenever I meet anyone who works at facebook, my first instinct is to extricate myself from that conversation.

Otherwise we might get to know each other, and become friends, and I'd never be sure that they weren't looking me up. My strategy for avoiding the prying eyes of facebook engineers is to be personally uninteresting to any facebook engineers.

This might not work so well if I were a chick.

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