Facebook reportedly fired 52 employees who were caught spying on users

Male engineers were able to view the locations, private messages, deleted photos and more of women they were romantically interested in.

Facebook fired 52 employees for abusing their access to the social network’s user data – including creepy men who obtained location data on women they were romantically interested in, according to a new report.

Using their access to troves of user data through Facebook’s internal systems, male engineers were able to view women’s locations, private messages, deleted photos and more, according to a bombshell report in The Telegraph.

In one instance described in the report, a Facebook engineer was on holiday with a woman in Europe when the two got into a fight and the woman wanted time alone.

Using Facebook data, the engineer reportedly tracked her down at her new hotel and confronted her.

In another case, an engineer reportedly used Facebook data to find out that a woman he was romantically interested in regularly visited Dolores Park in San Francisco, then used the information to go there and find her with her friends.

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Facebook has had to fire creepy employees for misusing data, according to a bombshell report. Picture: Olivier Douliery/AFP

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The majority of engineers who abused private information were men who looked up women they were interested in but did not confront them in person, according to the report, which is an excerpt from an upcoming book by New York Times reporters Sheera Frankel and Cecelia Kang.

While 52 employees were fired for such transgressions in 2014 and 2015, Facebook’s then-chief security officer Alex Stamos reportedly warned that hundreds of others may have slipped by unnoticed.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was allegedly upset when he found out about the widespread abuse of user information and asked why no one else at the company had thought to tighten engineers’ access to such data.

But Mr Zuckerberg himself had designed the company’s data access system and refused to change it as the company grew, according to the report.

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CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly upset when he heard about the engineers’ discretions. Picture: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/AFP

“At various times in Facebook’s history there were paths we could have taken, decisions we could have made, which would have limited, or even cut back on, the user data we were collecting,” one longtime Facebook employee told Frankel and Kang.

“But that was antithetical to Mark’s DNA,” the source continued.

“Even before we took those options to him, we knew it wasn’t a path he would choose.”

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We’ve always had zero tolerance for abuse and have fired every single employee ever found to be improperly accessing data.

“Since 2015, we’ve continued to strengthen our employee training, abuse detection and prevention protocols.

“We’re also continuing to reduce the need for engineers to access some types of data as they work to build and support our services.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission