The Facebook engineer was itching to know why his date hadn’t responded to his messages. Perhaps there was a simple explanation—maybe she was sick or on vacation.
So at 10 p.m. one night in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters, he brought up her Facebook profile on the company’s internal systems and began looking at her personal data. Her politics, her lifestyle, her interests—even her real-time location.
The engineer would be fired for his behavior, along with 51 other employees who had inappropriately abused their access to company data, a privilege that was then available to everyone who worked at Facebook, regardless of their job function or seniority. The vast majority of the 51 were just like him: men looking up information about the women they were interested in.
[…]
Source: Review: Why Facebook can never fix itself | MIT Technology Review