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!

r/IAmA

u/davidgrayPhotography wrote (the comment Michael replied to):

They might take privacy seriously on an individual level, but the product as a whole certainly didn't, because when graph search was first introduced, I was able to find users that met very specific criteria. And so was [Tom Scott](https://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/)

u/michaelnovati replied · May 4, 2022

I think this was a bad feature too but that feature did respect peoples privacy settings. The problem was that if people misconfigured their privacy settings a lot time ago and forgot, this would make it instantly discoverable, compared to when it might have been hard to discover in the past.