WASHINGTON- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly deployed “secretpolice” to catch and punish information leakers at his company.
According to a report in The Guardian, an unnamed employee was called to ameeting in 2017 under the guise of a promotion. However, he found himselfface to face with the secretive “rat-catching” team led by Sonya Ahuja, thecompany’s head of investigations.
The team had records of screenshots he had taken, links he had clicked orhovered over.
The “secret police” also accessed chats between him and a journalist datingback to before he joined the company.
“It’s horrifying how much they know. You go into Facebook and it has thiswarm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care aboutthings’.
“But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to facewith [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police,” the employee told TheGuardian.
According to the report, Zuckerberg hosts weekly meetings where he sharesdetails of unreleased new products and strategies in front of thousands ofemployees.
“When you first get to Facebook you are shocked at the level oftransparency. You are trusted with a lot of stuff you don’t need accessto,” the employee was quoted as saying.
During one of Zuckerberg’s weekly meetings in 2015, said the report, he hadwarned employees: “We’re going to find the leaker, and we’re going to firethem.”
According to a Facebook spokesperson “companies routinely use businessrecords in workplace investigations, and we are no exception”.
Not just Facebook, James Damore, the software engineer who was fired fromGoogle after writing a controversial anti-diversity memo, “suspects he wasbeing monitored by the company during his final days”.
James Damore stopped using his personal Gmail account after being fired,said the report.