Facebook privacy audit by auditors finds everything is awesome! The US Federal Trade Commission has released an audit of Facebook's privacy practices and it turns out there's nothing to worry about, at least as far as accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is concerned. Clearly, there's nothing to worry about. Go back to your homes, people. PwC, retained to check on how Facebook has …
Please note: part of this message has been redacted by ________ in the interest of protecting confidential ________.
We have completed our 2015-2017 audit of facebook, and things have gone remarkably well. We found facebook employees to be incredibly helpful; every time we arrived to audit their data center without announcing it first, some nice staffer would take us to lunch for two hours or so. Once we got back, they were very accommodating and allowed us to investigate all the parts of their data center, which is remarkably small for a company that big. It seems facebook has been storing next-to-nothing. Really, you can go to your facebook page and download their archive and that's all they have. Honest.
Meanwhile, we'd like to inform the independence unit division about the answers to their many questions about the integrity of this audit. Facebook has taken no actions to try to sway us at all ________, and they would like to meet all the members of the independence unit at a time of your choosing so they can ________. They told us that if you don't have time, they could ________. However, if you would rather not, you should probably know that ________ information that you probably don't ________. For example, in the case of independence unit researcher ________, it turns out that they ________, ________, ________, and ________. I'm sure you will be available for facebook to inform you of any relevant information, which I'm sure you would like to read before you sign off on our document. We remain extremely interested in the integrity of our reporting. ________. Please let us know if you have any questions.
With the warmest regards,
Committee for the Analysis of Facebook's Privacy Endeavor
Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC)
1 Hacker Way,
Menlo Park, CA, 94025
A lot has happened in 7 years. Maybe they need an updated policy in light of all current BS and then audit to that. Although after the dog and pony show with Congress, I guess all will be declared well by all parties and it'll be business as usual. SSDD or maybe SSDY*.
*SSDY = Same S**t Different Year
Who audits the auditors auditors?
That's also a problem, the auditors in this case are PwC. Ernst and Young do the Facebook accounts (plus Google and Apple, Microsoft is Deloitte) so on first glance I would expect them to be independent, however looking at the audit I'm going to say not a chance.
The thing about auditors is that so long as you can justify what you put on paper, then you're in the clear. If you messed up on date X, simply put it on paper that you messed up on date X, put a reason why you messed up ( not the right one obviously, are you stupid?! ) and all will be well with the company for another year. The second you have no paperwork, that's when you're in trouble with them! They're beancounters, they love paperwork, justificaitons, crossing the "T" 's and dotting those "I" 's, that's all that matters.
No, nuke the comms links to the FB server farms, then they're simply be locked away from the rest of humanity. Remember Zuck and his mates think they're above the rest of us so they would never bother to check they can communicate with us, so they'd never know they've been cut off.
Maybe then we can advance a couple of percent down the evolutionary path without a constant stream of cat pictures, inane pictures of cousin John's latest drinking binge and what Aunty Doris did on holiday this year!
One needs to remember that they made their name doing "accounting" err... vote tabulation for various high visibility award programs, like the Oscars, etc. Their name is out there and well known. However, all the scandals haven't seemed to touch them in the public eye.
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Right! Who paid for PWC's audit of Facebook, Facebook by any chance? Does anyone believe what Big-Accounting puts out these days.... 2 words: Arthur Andersen... I'd rather buy a CDO rated by Moody's / S&P than believe a PWC report. The hilarious thing is, these outfits can't even get simple Expat taxes right. Yet no one really ever calls them about. They're unaccountable like a corrupt / inept Regulator that never gets fired / retired!
PwC doesn't need to be bribed. That's just part of the service a big company gets when paying their normal eye-watering fees.
They will carefully study the ethics of the situation.. in order to figure out just how far you can go without getting caught. And if they do get caught, they have the high-powered expertise to insist, against all logic, that everything conformed to the regulations/rules/consent decree.
This doesn't always extend to their smaller clients, which simply get mid-grade service for high fees. If you won't quickly grow into a major account, you won't get any breaks.
It's no trade secret Facebook make their money from selling our data.
So why has everybody got a problem.
Facebook is "too big to fail" now that so many other businesses have their marketing tied to the platform and business model. So the FTC is reluctant to upset the big end of town.
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