Facebook and the downsides of transparency

Hi folks, it's Brad. One of the most surprising things about the widening Facebook scandal is how former employee Frances Haugen obtained the trove of internal documents—and what that says about Silicon Valley culture. But first...

Today's top tech news:

New Apple watches are in tight supply, leading to wait times
Facebook says it's willing to open algorithms to regulators
Facebook capped off last week with another outage

The powerful Congressional testimony last week from former Facebook employee Frances Haugen might prompt new federal regulation and will likely damage the social network's already teetering brand reputation. But the most immediate victim could be the culture of extreme internal transparency at some Silicon Valley companies—the very thing that allowed the whistleblower to make off with tens of thousands of internal documents in the first place.

Among the startling revelations over the past week was that Haugen obtained the documents, which described the company's allegedly lackluster efforts to combat misinformation and violence, in her last month at the company—after she had already quit her job as a product manager. At most companies, this would earn an employee a one-way ticket out the door. At freewheeling Facebook, Haugen was able to stick around for a few weeks to pass her projects onto colleagues, and to trawl the company's internal bulletin boards collecting incriminating communiques that had little to do with her job.

Facebook's loose exit policy and apparently lax data-security policies aren't unique. They're part of a culture of internal transparency that's commonplace in some corners of Silicon Valley. The idea, conveyed to new recruits at orientation, is that employees have access to significant amounts of internal research and documentation, so they know what's happening elsewhere at the company. Such free rein helps them collaborate with far-flung colleagues but is also a job perk, allowing them to fulfill any ambition or curiosity they have about other parts of the business.

This culture of permissiveness didn't originate at Facebook. As my colleagues Ryan Gallagher and Mark Bergen wrote two years ago, Google first based the practice on the principles of open-source software development, where the programming community collaborates to write code by making it freely available to anyone who wants to improve it. The search giant also established end-of-the-week Q&As with its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, dubbed TGIF, during which employees were allowed to interrogate their bosses. Facebook followed suit with its own weekly Q&A with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.

In retrospect, such radical transparency assumed that employees all held the same effervescent faith in the company's ideals and positive impact on the world. That is clearly no longer the case. A few years ago, the right-wing site Breitbart obtained video of Google's first TGIF after the 2016 presidential election, in which executives expressed disappointment about Donald Trump's presidential victory. Zuck's company-wide Q&As also started regularly leaking. Workers who no longer believed in the cause—or felt their companies might be doing harm—had found a weakness in their employers' idealistic spirit of openness.

Employees at Google and Facebook now attest that their cultures that are far less transparent than they used to be. The companies track which documents employees are accessing and monitor when internal communiques are leaving company networks. (In Haugen's case, these measures inexplicably failed.) At Facebook, divisions like Oculus, the virtual reality outfit, and Portal (formerly Building 8), its hardware skunkworks, are strictly hived off from the rest of the company. Executive Q&As with employees are far less frank and are occasionally made public, to head off leakers.

If these trends continue, Facebook and Google could start to resemble two of their big tech brethren. Amazon and Apple never recognized the virtues of internal transparency. Both have thrived with strictly compartmentalized internal silos and almost tyrannical levels of secrecy.

Even so, Apple, like Facebook, is also finding itself at odds with its own employees. It recently closed an internal Slack channel where employees were discussing the issue of pay equity. And in a recent email to employees, CEO Tim Cook warned workers to stop divulging plans for future products to the media and said that leakers could face jail time and massive fines.

Cook is incensed by employees who spill secrets to the media. Compared to Mark Zuckerberg, he's got little to worry about. —Brad Stone

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