algorithmist:

Facebook Engineers: We Have No Idea Where We Keep All Your Personal Data

In a discovery hearing, two veteran Facebook engineers told the court that the company doesn’t keep track of all your personal data.

The Intercept

The admissions occurred during a hearing with special master Daniel Garrie, a court-appointed subject-matter expert tasked with resolving a disclosure impasse. Garrie was attempting to get the company to provide an exhaustive, definitive accounting of where personal data might be stored in some 55 Facebook subsystems. Both veteran Facebook engineers, with according to LinkedIn two decades of experience between them, struggled to even venture what may be stored in Facebook’s subsystems. “I’m just trying to understand at the most basic level from this list what we’re looking at,” Garrie asked.

“I don’t believe there’s a single person that exists who could answer that question,” replied Eugene Zarashaw, a Facebook engineering director. “It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question.”

When asked about how Facebook might track down every bit of data associated with a given user account, Zarashaw was stumped again: “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the — where the data flows. I would be surprised if there’s even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively.”