Two longtime Meta engineers were “concerned” about how the company stores and keeps track of user data and revealed that they don’t believe anyone at the company could compile all the data belonging to a single user.
According to foreign media, the Telegraph reports, the two engineers were questioned during a court hearing as part of a consumer privacy lawsuit centered around the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The engineers were questioned in March of this year, but the minutes of the hearing were recently leaked, as first reported by The Intercept.
The questioning was led by a court-appointed technical expert who was trying to determine exactly what information Facebook stores about users and where it is all kept.
One of the engineers was Eugene Zarashaw, whose LinkedIn profile says he is director of engineering at Meta and has worked there for nearly nine years.
The second was Steven Elia, who is described on LinkedIn as a software engineering manager who spent 11 years at Facebook.
As Business Insider points out, the Telegraph reports, the expert appointed by the court asked who at Facebook would be able to answer the question: where is all the information about a single user stored?
“I don’t believe there is a single person who can answer this question. It would take a significant team effort to be able to answer that question,” Zarashaw replied.
A Meta spokesperson told The Intercept that it was not surprising that individual engineers could not identify where all the data for a single user was stored on the company’s systems.
“We have made – and continue to make – significant investments to meet our privacy commitments and obligations, including extensive data controls,” the spokesperson said.
Meta did not immediately respond when contacted by BI for comment.