… or does it? Just read an article in ValleyWag that points at a number of data privacy infractions that Facebook employees have allegedly taken part in. The infractions range from checking out a date’s details, seeing what profiles they have visited etc. The truth is, having that amount of data at your fingertips can be tempting. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a social network, membership management software or a club database, having data available can be a temptation.
Or is it? Mining the data, finding trends, seeing what you can do with the information you have available are all part of being effective in your job. If Facebook employees decide to zoom down to an individual to see what profiles he’s visiting, then so be it. Manipulating that data is part of their day job and sometimes curiousity is that encourages people to learn how far they can push a system’s boundaries. I think Valleywag can be sensationalist at times and this is one of those cases. Any DBA will tell you that if there is data of interest in a database, they can find a way to extract it; and in doing so, they learn more about the database, the data and the way people are using their system. Just let them get on with it!