Facebook’s Double Standard on Privacy: Employees vs. Everyone Else

‘We have had discussions about this very idea,” a Facebook spokesman said when asked why users aren’t flagged if an employee accesses their records

A small group of Facebook Inc. employees have permission to access users’ profiles without the users finding out.

Yet any time a Facebook employee accesses a colleague’s personal profile, the colleague is notified through what is often referred to within the company as a “Sauron alert”—a reference to the all-seeing eye in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, people familiar with the matter say.

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