*Los Angeles: *Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly deployed “secretpolice” led by Indian-American Sonya Ahuja to catch and punish thoseleaking information about the social media giant in press, a media reporthas said.
Mr Zuckerberg hosts weekly meetings where he shares details of unreleasednew products and strategies in front of thousands of employees, TheGuardian reported.
During one of his weekly meetings in 2015, the usually affable CEO warnedemployees: “We’re going to find the leaker, and we’re going to fire them”.
A week later, Mr Zuckerberg revealed the culprit had been caught and fired.
The media report, citing an unnamed former employee at Facebook, said thathe was called into a meeting last year under the guise of a promotion wherethe investigative team interrogated him.
The interrogation by the “rat-catching” team, led by the company’s head ofinvestigations Ms Ahuja, was a technicality; they already knew he wasguilty of leaking some innocuous information to the press, the report said.
They had records of a screenshot he’d taken, links he had clicked orhovered over, and they strongly indicated they had accessed chats betweenhim and the journalist, dating back to before he joined the company, itsaid.
“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 toface with Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police,” he told The Guardian.
When asked about the report, a Facebook spokeswoman Bertie Thomson said:”Companies routinely use business records in workplace investigations, andwe are no exception”.