What Facebook's Security Double Standard Tells Us About How It Views User Privacy

Last week was a busy one for the conversation around digital privacy as Facebook fired an employee of its security division for allegedly misusing his privileged access to stalk women, while the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the company's own employees are protected by a special privacy feature that alerts them when its security employees access their profiles. In the space of just one week, it emerged that Facebook's security staff can access any of the platform's ordinary two billion profiles and rummage through them without the user ever knowing their information has been accessed, while if those same security staff attempt to access a fellow Facebook employee's profile to investigate misconduct or illegal activity, that employee will receive a notice they are being investigated. What does this double standard teach us about how social media platforms view their users? Perhaps the most interesting element of Facebook's system, originally called "Sauron alert" and now known simply as "Security Watchdog" is that alerts are sent directly to the employees whose profiles are accessed, rather than to corporate legal, human resources or some other watchdog division. One could imagine a process in which all accesses to employee profiles are routed to a dedicated staff in the legal department to review for appropriateness. Under this model the employee whose profile is accessed by security would never know their profile was viewed.