"Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch may have not been completely truthful while under oath when taking questions in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 31, 2017.
Stretch was being grilled by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) about the extent of Facebook’s ability to profile users on the social media website. Stretch told Kennedy that Facebook had done away with the ability of employees to compile or access profiles on individual users."
...
"Stretch’s assuredness puzzled many observers at the time. Others called Stretch out for those allegedly misleading comments. Even Vanity Fair wrote approvingly of Kennedy’s intensive questioning of Stretch. Now, it appears Stretch’s critics were correct in their estimation of his allegedly evasive comments.
A little-noticed late Thursday report in the Wall Street Journal notes:"
Stretch was being grilled by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) about the extent of Facebook’s ability to profile users on the social media website. Stretch told Kennedy that Facebook had done away with the ability of employees to compile or access profiles on individual users."
...
"Stretch’s assuredness puzzled many observers at the time. Others called Stretch out for those allegedly misleading comments. Even Vanity Fair wrote approvingly of Kennedy’s intensive questioning of Stretch. Now, it appears Stretch’s critics were correct in their estimation of his allegedly evasive comments.
A little-noticed late Thursday report in the Wall Street Journal notes:"
"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.
Similar protections don’t exist for the two billion-plus Facebook users who don’t work for the company, the people said."