In March, two veteran Facebook engineers discovered themselves grilled about the company’s sprawling facts collection operations in a hearing for the ongoing lawsuit over the mishandling of private consumer info stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The listening to, a transcript of which was a short while ago unsealed, was aimed at resolving a single critical problem: What information and facts, precisely, does Fb retail outlet about us, and in which is it? The engineers’ response will occur as minor aid to those concerned with the company’s stewardship of billions of digitized life: They do not know.
The admissions transpired throughout a hearing with exclusive master Daniel Garrie, a court docket-appointed subject-matter expert tasked with resolving a disclosure deadlock. Garrie was making an attempt to get the enterprise to offer an exhaustive, definitive accounting of in which personal knowledge may well be saved in some 55 Facebook subsystems.