Facebook‘s ad systems need help keeping up with the amount of user data they collect. The social network’s privacy engineers also warned that the company could get in trouble with regulators in the US, Europe, India, and other places.
The problem is that the system that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, built has “open borders,” the engineers said in a report from last year that seems to have been leaked.
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“Imagine you are holding a bottle of ink. This bottle of ink contains all kinds of user data mixed. You put that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) it flows everywhere, “they put words on paper. “How do you get that ink back into the bottle? How do you get it back in order, so it only flows into the lake in the right places?”
Because of this, it’s hard to tell outside groups that data isn’t being used for things that aren’t allowed by laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR.
Meta told CNET that the document doesn’t explain its “extensive processes and controls” for following rules and that the data lake analogy isn’t clear.
A company spokesperson said via email, “New privacy regulations around the world bring different requirements, and this document shows the technical solutions we’re building to scale the current steps we’re taking to manage data and meet our obligations.”
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