They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know.
Context: I worked at Facebook
It's 850 pages long, and the few spots I jumped to the guy kept answering with "I don't know", "I'm not familiar with this", etc. Even the parts he says "I'm familiar with this service", the guy goes on to answer "I don't know more than what's written there". The guy couldn't even answer if certain databases were accessible by third parties (not implying they were).
This must have been painful to be a part of. 100 variations of "I can neither confirm nor deny".
The where part is also alluded to as to mean "systems" from what I gathered.
They need to have an exhaustive list of how they're using private data, and they need to have a process ensuring that their engineers are not adding new sources of private data or not using existing private data without the company approving and updating that list. Yes, their current processes aren't fit for that - as Meta documents quoted in TFA say "We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’" - so these processes must be changed.
If you’re Facebook you have to know this in order to process that data. You can’t pretend not to understand the question.
You're right. If the questions were being asked of someone who was genuinely motivated to answer them, this wouldn't be an obstacle.
The phrase "all your personal data" (or the quote from the article, "every bit of data associated with a given user account") feels vague and imprecise only if you have an internal understanding that for practical purposes, it really is impossible. The Facebook engineers know that and everyone here knows that. It's not literally impossible - an internal team of digital archaeologists with unlimited resources and no deadline might be able to do it for a single user. But practically impossible across the whole userbase.
If you were genuinely interested in providing insight to the hearing, you could explain all that, and then explain how you could go about creating a rough sketch of an answer, and how you'd go about adding some detail to that sketch.
The Facebook engineers have no real motivation to provide insight off their own bat. They can take the question literally, and answer honestly that they don't know, that nobody else knows, and that it's probably impossible TO know. I'm not even sure if this is acting in bad faith. I can easily imagine feeling cagey in this situation, and responding as such. Experiencing an emotion isn't acting in bad faith.
All that said...these questions were asked by a court-appointed subject matter expert. Either the subject matter expert is not the right person for the job, or...and now I realise that of course I haven't read the transcript and there's every chance that what's quoted in the article is not the most insight the court managed to prise out of the engineers. posting anyway in 3 2 1
>What does it mean "all your personal data"? It means all your personal data.
>What does "where" mean? Where facebook stores it.
This is only a complicated question if you want to start saying, "Well this isnt really their personal data, we just use it for x..." If its data related to my account or me as a user it's my personal data.
Maybe its difficult to track all that down but certainly that is a challenge worth tackling in a world where GDPR exists.