The irony of a surveillance program being undone by its own data leaking is hard to miss. But the more interesting question is what happens next — do they rebuild it with better security, or does the backlash actually change the approach?
My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.
The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.
Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around.
I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).
Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.
I hope there’s a day where collectively the money is no longer enough and reason and good will prevails so that Meta can crumble to dust while I am alive; but doubtful that day will ever come.
I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire.
I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.
You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day.
You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.
In a large portion of tech people like to pretend that they are absolved of responsibility for their societal contributions. “Get that bag” and all that. Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response
> Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
You don’t work at Anduril to make bread, at least not as a software engineer. It’s a long hours startup with worse pay than FAANG in high CoL areas. The people that work there fundamentally believe in “improving the defense of the west”.
It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military. If you want to bag on people in the military, go ahead. But they are not in the same category as people just doing things for convenient good money.
People don’t particularly care for platitudes from anonymous people on the internet. Even less so when they reduce a complex dilemma in your life to a binary choice between an “easy and amoral” option and a “difficult but righteous” one.
Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize, rationalize, and forgive themselves for.
It’s just tiresome. There may not be a ton of context, but even knowing that someone is bound to a particular place because of caregiving responsibilities should be enough to invite a little more empathy and grace, and a lot less judgment.
They are not understanding that it's not one person's moral failing at the root of it, it's the system that forces everyone into participating in amoral things, including for example the investors of Meta who are getting a bigger bag. That includes every one of you S&P500 index fund hodlers.
It's both. We can point to individuals who make terrible decisions and also acknowledge that there will always be such people as long as the system incentivizes them.
How many of index fund investors take a short position on Meta to cancel out that share? That's pretty easy to do. If it's nobody then everyone is "such people" and it is meaningless to single out any one person. Just acknowledge that there is no moral high ground for anyone. You either provide labor or capital to the enterprise, which is worse?
No. It's not not doing everything, it's not doing even the easiest thing.
You don't get to hide behind "investing" just because there are some intermediaries to move money for you. You are actively gaining a profit from Meta and investing for the long term, meaning you don't even need the money for 10+ years. That's way worse than someone contributing labor to do some work in exchange for pay now. In fact you are paying their salary to do all these things you despise, and insist that they do more of it for more $ every quarter when there are any number of safe though less profitable alternatives. How does it feel?
Talk is cheap. Time to put your money where your mouth is.
Yes, it actually is, because your argument can be applied to every moral question. Why aren't you taking a short position in Meta when Meta is an evil company? Why are you drinking a coffee while a kid in Africa is starving? Why aren't you standing by the lake if a kid could be drowning?
People can't be expected to do literally every single thing that would make a positive impact. But they absolutely can be expected not to actively do evil.
> In fact you are paying their salary
I don't hold any investments in Meta, direct or indirect.
I'll make sure to shame my Illumina scientist neighbor for working on tech that deliberately targets underage children (purposely violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.). After all, he owns the world's most popular index fund, which includes Meta. He certainly should feel just as culpable as the Meta employees!
The Meta employee does as they are told. Your neighbor gives money to Zuck and asks him to tell the Meta employee what to do, sharing in profit with Zuck. Yes, he is worse. Way worse. Drug mule vs. drug financier type worse. He can also stop any time with a few clicks. What's stopping him?
Your argument erases the employee's biggest moral choice: did the Meta employee just spawn a Meta employee? No, they chose to work there. You assign maximal agency to someone buying an index fund and minimal agency to someone who voluntarily spends 40 hours a week advancing Meta's objectives. That's backwards. (Or, more likely, a purposeful troll comment).
Did the index fund just drop in someone's lap? No. They chose to place orders to turn cash into stocks that control Meta's objectives. Every argument you make about an employee you can make about an investor. The difference is, as I said, the chain of command goes one way, and history has something to say about the relative culpability of each end. You may want to reflect on that.
At the end of the day, how someone spends 40 hours a week is as much your business as how someone spends their money is my business. That you fail to see it is indicative of your own biases.
Wrong. It's someone who owns shares in some LLC that does contract killing and hired the hit man, and many others. You keep trying to skirt around the obvious, which looks very ridiculous.
I think there would be more empathy if Meta were the only company in the world where it was possible to work. That's "stuck." This is not.
I've quit jobs over ethical boundaries. It's not an easy decision, and "integrity" doesn't quite pay rent, but helped me to sleep better at night and let me live with myself.
I agree. That said, a cursory glance at their post history shows they donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily.
We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at Meta is a choice, and takes hard work to get into. That does not absolve you from the damage the company has done to the world. If you work there, you contribute to it (no matter how small the capacity) and you benefit from it literally through wages and share ownership. Your vested interest is in the company growing. Historically, that has meant via very dark patterns.
> donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
Have you considered that the harm of the loss of 6 figures can completely destroy local charities?
This quickly devolves into effective altruism and the problems that come with that but it’s very easy to end up in a situation where you think the net good you bring by keeping a local abused women shelter open far outweighs the negative consequences for working at Meta.
I don't care to dive into imaginary philosophical debates. I'm responding to the person in this thread saying, "I'm stuck" while clearly being financially well-off.
You're making it very easy for them here. Giving up on any kind of personal integrity or responsibility in exchange for a lot of money is not a complex dilemma. You don't need context to see it's wrong. It's a classic deal with the devil, a literary trope as old as time.
It’s okay, I put my thoughts out there and I appreciate the feedback from other engineers.
It’s actually kind of motivating. I’d interviewed at several places over the last few months and something out of my control always came up and halted the process (remote work closed down, hiring freeze, etc), so I’m definitely feeling a bit down about job prospects right now.
I needed some people to remind me “no, don’t be complacent, keep trying, there’s stuff out there and it’s worth the effort to continue looking”
I don't blame someone for working at facebook, but I don't think most of you realize how cash money a FANG company looks on your resume to IT managers at the lowly normal companies. Go work in financial services, insurance, retail, go be a contractor and work/travel until you find what you like.
The key point here is the “pay less” part. I know people that have turned down offers from meta that would 5x their salary and their personal situation would notably improve from at least some of that extra cash.
The OP is a bit preachy and maybe some employees really don’t have any other options even with accepting lower salaries, but the majority should at least realise the golden handcuffs their bound by even if they choose not to act on them.
This exactly. I value working from home and not working for a company that actively makes the world hell, so I make a quarter of what some of my peers at FAANG-adjacent companies make. Which is still a lot more than I realistically need.
Is there any place you look or way of looking that has you in that job? I'm currently happy with my ethical and remote job myself, but I question if it will be around in 10 years, and I especially hate job hunting.
But I also think all of the people criticizing Meta should post where they work. I'm sure plenty of people here work for ethically dubious companies, and make the same excuses.
The gall of one of the best-compensated people on the planet acting like they
had no place else to go. Well, Mister Ivory Tower, I've got news for you: Having a conscience doesn't come for free. You'll be fine with a lower pay that's still several multiples of what other people make.
You don't need to retire early, there are companies aplenty that accept remote workers. But you won't, because you sold yourself out for money.
Why did they discontinue that? It was a very good product; we got them for all the grandparents and they worked really well at bringing the family together across distance. Could have fit in so well with WhatsApp too. But then they just killed it.
Shareholders didn't like it. At the end of the day Meta is an advertising company so everything they do must be in service of increasing revenue from advertising.
How so? Most of the hardcore encryption stuff was built at Facebook under the founder's supervision afaik for the purposes of making it harder for Zuck to inevitably ruin the privacy aspects.
I personally don't use it, because it _is_ loaded with engagement bait but its not all worse and is better in some ways.
That last one’s going to need some substantiation.
“In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them.” (https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967)
No. It's a special arrangement between Google and WhatsApp which makes a file only visible to WhatsApp, and not appear in your regular drive so you can't do normal cloud file operations like generating public links.
Without evidence of this “special arrangement” I don’t see why anyone should believe you. You made a claim that is directly contrary to WhatsApp’s published materials and they have a lot to lose if you are correct. On the other hand, if your accusation is false, it’s tantamount to libel.
> You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.
No need for the attitude. Op asked you for a source, which is customary for one to back up their initial claim; an onus on you and not for someone else to validate your claims.
From an infrastructure PoV, I seem to recall that WhatsApp was one of the few major companies that used Erlang, and were famous for being able to run the entirety of WhatsApp on only a few servers, each of which was serving millions of concurrent connections, mostly thanks to Erlang/BEAM (at least, from what I read). When it got acquired by Facebook, they then proceeded to rewrite the entirety of the backend in C++. Seems kind of baffling to me.
Not yet they haven't. They've basically left it alone, with very minor UI/UX improvements.
They have very recently shown signs of making it worse (the AI button), but overall I've been surprised how careful they've been about doing it slowly. We've probably got another 5-10 years of it being great before they turn it to shit.
Yeah, I'll admit they've basically left it alone, but I'd chalk up the changes as minor UI/UX regressions that have ballooned the app size by an order of magnitude since it was acquired.
And the native Windows app was a post-Facebook introduction, but it was also Facebook that canned it in favour of the current web wrapper turd.
Even the original idea (if The Social Network is a trustworthy source) was copied -- Zuckerberg just has a complete lack of vision, but is clearly an intelligent operator with good business sense. Jagged intelligence, like an LLM.
Except there is plenty of public evidence Facebook was. I think they were even on the cap table and thiel / palintir are explicitly partners in wiring up tech data pipelines into the knowledge graph. Thats why thiel was an early investor, this is known public info.
Thanks for that. I am confused about your prior comment. Maybe we are both cia and have forgotten because we were part of mk ultra and melted each other's memories
has zuckerberg done anything productive of his own accord? facebook was ripped off. most meta companies were acquired. it could be argued that propagandizing the entire world was productive relative to vested interests but that was done on the behest of those interests, not zuck himself. the only thing im aware of zuck actually spearheading was the metaverse, a conclusively unproductive pursuit costing tens of billions to achieve literally nothing. it isnt objective to unilaterally behave with vitriol ... still this person seems more comparable to cancer itself than any actual human. i guess you could collapse productivity to 'making money' in which case clearly he is productive, im more referring to accomplishing anything useful for humanity. i also dont consider mass surveillance to be useful for humanity as bad actors will always get away with it whether they are on or off camera.
We just had a thing that would export MSN messenger contact list, you'd add your email there and everyone would add you on MSN. Way less creepy than the stalking fb was doing.
I don't think you can say that the idea was "copied". It was a very obvious idea. I had the same idea before I heard of the Facebook. Do you know why it's called the face book?
You may as well say Bezos copied the idea of Amazon from book shops.
Really, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
It was US only as you had to have a .edu email address to join, which most universities around the world did not get as it was mostly a US thing. It took forever for them to open up to non-US universities.
The hook that Facebook had over MySpace (and the million other "Social Network" platforms of that day) was that you couldn't embed shitty HTML intot he profile
Binning applications for working at Meta seems hilarious and over the top. The ‘thoughtful’ labs are vacuuming up everyone’s chat logs and prompts to train the next model as well.
What are these "thoughtful" frontier labs you speak of? I see Meta folks going to the big ones all the time. Ton of former PyTorch/Inductor folks now are at Ant/TM etc.
Everyone I know in the GPU compiler/GPGPU space seems to be either going to meta or leaving meta for NV or some AI lab. My anecdotal observations don't align with "bin meta applicants straight to the trash."
Yea I was going to ask the same question about "thoughtful frontier labs". Not sure that's really a thing unless we're talking about being thoughtful of accumulating wealth and power for a small handful of people.
I have to assume "thoughtful frontier labs" is either a pretty small lab, or a place holder for a lab that doesn't exist. So many of these anti-meta posts come off as based entirely in the feelings of opinionated techies rather than actual reality.
They author thousands of open-source. Nobody would consider those 'products' (though feel free to play pedantic). And many would argue React did far more harm than good.
We would still have a framework of the week like we do today. There was a new framework weekly before React and there are frameworks of the week after React. React just gave us one more way of showing text on a screen.
My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.
The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.
I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).
Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.
I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire.
I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.
1. Find another job 2. Don’t find another job
You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day.
You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.
It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response
You don’t work at Anduril to make bread, at least not as a software engineer. It’s a long hours startup with worse pay than FAANG in high CoL areas. The people that work there fundamentally believe in “improving the defense of the west”.
It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military. If you want to bag on people in the military, go ahead. But they are not in the same category as people just doing things for convenient good money.
If the motivation is 'improving the defence of the west', it's more equivalent to joining a fringe paramilitary organisation; the dogwhistle is clear.
Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize, rationalize, and forgive themselves for.
It’s just tiresome. There may not be a ton of context, but even knowing that someone is bound to a particular place because of caregiving responsibilities should be enough to invite a little more empathy and grace, and a lot less judgment.
You don't get to hide behind "investing" just because there are some intermediaries to move money for you. You are actively gaining a profit from Meta and investing for the long term, meaning you don't even need the money for 10+ years. That's way worse than someone contributing labor to do some work in exchange for pay now. In fact you are paying their salary to do all these things you despise, and insist that they do more of it for more $ every quarter when there are any number of safe though less profitable alternatives. How does it feel?
Talk is cheap. Time to put your money where your mouth is.
Yes, it actually is, because your argument can be applied to every moral question. Why aren't you taking a short position in Meta when Meta is an evil company? Why are you drinking a coffee while a kid in Africa is starving? Why aren't you standing by the lake if a kid could be drowning?
People can't be expected to do literally every single thing that would make a positive impact. But they absolutely can be expected not to actively do evil.
> In fact you are paying their salary
I don't hold any investments in Meta, direct or indirect.
I'll make sure to shame my Illumina scientist neighbor for working on tech that deliberately targets underage children (purposely violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.). After all, he owns the world's most popular index fund, which includes Meta. He certainly should feel just as culpable as the Meta employees!
Your argument erases the employee's biggest moral choice: did the Meta employee just spawn a Meta employee? No, they chose to work there. You assign maximal agency to someone buying an index fund and minimal agency to someone who voluntarily spends 40 hours a week advancing Meta's objectives. That's backwards. (Or, more likely, a purposeful troll comment).
At the end of the day, how someone spends 40 hours a week is as much your business as how someone spends their money is my business. That you fail to see it is indicative of your own biases.
I'll repeat myself: what a mindset!
I've quit jobs over ethical boundaries. It's not an easy decision, and "integrity" doesn't quite pay rent, but helped me to sleep better at night and let me live with myself.
In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily.
We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at Meta is a choice, and takes hard work to get into. That does not absolve you from the damage the company has done to the world. If you work there, you contribute to it (no matter how small the capacity) and you benefit from it literally through wages and share ownership. Your vested interest is in the company growing. Historically, that has meant via very dark patterns.
Have you considered that the harm of the loss of 6 figures can completely destroy local charities?
This quickly devolves into effective altruism and the problems that come with that but it’s very easy to end up in a situation where you think the net good you bring by keeping a local abused women shelter open far outweighs the negative consequences for working at Meta.
It’s actually kind of motivating. I’d interviewed at several places over the last few months and something out of my control always came up and halted the process (remote work closed down, hiring freeze, etc), so I’m definitely feeling a bit down about job prospects right now.
I needed some people to remind me “no, don’t be complacent, keep trying, there’s stuff out there and it’s worth the effort to continue looking”
The OP is a bit preachy and maybe some employees really don’t have any other options even with accepting lower salaries, but the majority should at least realise the golden handcuffs their bound by even if they choose not to act on them.
This exactly. I value working from home and not working for a company that actively makes the world hell, so I make a quarter of what some of my peers at FAANG-adjacent companies make. Which is still a lot more than I realistically need.
But I also think all of the people criticizing Meta should post where they work. I'm sure plenty of people here work for ethically dubious companies, and make the same excuses.
Glass houses and all that.
get with the times
It's always the same.
You don't need to retire early, there are companies aplenty that accept remote workers. But you won't, because you sold yourself out for money.
https://www.meta.com/ca/portal/
lol
now in arctic white!
I personally don't use it, because it _is_ loaded with engagement bait but its not all worse and is better in some ways.
“In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them.” (https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967)
You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.
No need for the attitude. Op asked you for a source, which is customary for one to back up their initial claim; an onus on you and not for someone else to validate your claims.
There is no “make things harder for the dictator” at Meta/Fb and never has been.
They have very recently shown signs of making it worse (the AI button), but overall I've been surprised how careful they've been about doing it slowly. We've probably got another 5-10 years of it being great before they turn it to shit.
And the native Windows app was a post-Facebook introduction, but it was also Facebook that canned it in favour of the current web wrapper turd.
https://whyy.org/segments/facebook-a-computing-pioneer-a-sec...
It probably will surprise no one to learn his "next big thing" is a prediction market app.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/technology/meta-predictio...
Hits the Meta product trifecta perfectly:
* Derivative
* Late to market
* Harmful to society
You may as well say Bezos copied the idea of Amazon from book shops.
Really, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
Everyone I know in the GPU compiler/GPGPU space seems to be either going to meta or leaving meta for NV or some AI lab. My anecdotal observations don't align with "bin meta applicants straight to the trash."
zstd
I’m torn about React and PyTorch :)
Maybe I'm exaggerating slightly, but I think we should judge frameworks compared to what other things existed at the time.
It's, by the way, another example of how the only good thing Facebook did was deny Google complete dominance.
Well, yes, but... its popularity is not completely accidental. It's good - even by today's standards, but certainly by the standards of the time.