I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

I don't think we'll fully cover this topic here but I have one thing to add which is that all the engineers at Facebook take privacy very seriously when building products. Sure there have been bugs reported and engineering mistakes, like at any company, but focus on privacy first when building new features and products was paramount. Facebook's biggest mistake was in not understanding how a lot of people interpret the word "user data" differently across the world. Facebook's primary goal with user data is to keep it safe, secure, and protected. When the press said things like "sell user data", people took that literally and were appalled because no Facebook employee would betray the users like that. But a lot of people interpret "sell user data" as making money in any way from the way data might be matched up, even if that's done safely and anonymously.