Facebook insider speaks
By Bala Shah

Facebook is the hottest social networking site in the world with more than 350 million members.  In India, it is fast catching up with Google’s Orkut. Facebook was founded by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg who is one of the most influential people in the world.

US based Rumpus.net is an online magazine focused on culture, as opposed to “pop culture.” The Rumpus site says it is ‘not worried about being the first to break the news. We care about good writing, and we’ll publish essays just because the writing is good.’

But is seems that Rumpus may have been the first news site in the world to report on what really happens inside Facebook.  Rumpus has just published an in-depth interview with an anonymous Facebook engineer which reveals lax security and fudged membership numbers given to public. The Rumpus article also reveals all the good things happening inside Facebook.  Excerpts from the interview

“
Rumpus: And how many users are you up to now?
Facebook Employee: That I can disclose publicly? Two hundred to two hundred twenty million.

Rumpus: And actually?
Facebook Employee: That’s just active users. As far as total accounts, including those that are potentially fake, disabled and whatnot, we’re over three hundred million. The two hundred twenty million are users who have logged on and done something with the site in the last thirty days.

Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
Facebook Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
Facebook Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.

I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.

Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?
Facebook Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.
“

Read the full Rumpus interview to understand how Facebook works. What is surprising is that the interview gives enough hints about the employee for him/her to be tracked down by the Facebook HR team.  Naturally, the anonymous employee will be sacked if they are tracked down.