Facebook investigating whether employee stalked woman online
An allegation that a Facebook employee potentially used work-granted access to stalk a woman online has prompted a company investigation.
The alleged incident stems from a cybersecurity consultant who tweeted Sunday that she had information indicating a Facebook engineer used his privileged access to stalk the woman.
The consultant, Jackie Stokes, tweeted a screenshot of what she said was a log from a conversation on the dating app Tinder that appears to show the Facebook engineer’s saying he was "a professional stalker."
Facebook issued a statement today that did not specifically comment on the employee in question, whose identity has not been publicly disclosed, but noted it is investigating.
"Although we can’t comment on any individual personnel matters, we are aware of the situation and investigating," Facebook said in a statement to ABC News.
"We maintain strict technical controls and policies to restrict employee access to user data. Access is scoped by job function, and designated employees are only allowed to access the amount of information that’s necessary to carry out their job responsibilities, such as responding to bug reports, account support inquiries, or valid legal requests. We have a zero-tolerance approach to abuse, and improper behavior results in termination," the statement said.
The employee in question has since been fired, a Facebook source told ABC News.
Stokes says she will not be speaking to journalists or disclosing "any additional detail [sic] regarding the Facebook issue beyond their security team," she told ABC News today.
But she did release additional details about the case in other tweets. In one, she noted that the ability to link one's Tinder account to an account on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, may have allowed the accused Facebook employee to track the woman on Tinder.
"I have a suspicion that her Instagram account which was connected to Tinder was used to identify her," Stokes wrote in a tweet. "The question is whether he was able to find the information he gave her in chat (which caused her, a software engineer herself, to be terrified) by identifying her on Facebook."
In another tweet, Stokes appeared to suggest that Facebook has made a good-faith effort to address the issue.
"They’ve reached out, and not within the context of avoiding negative PR, but to find out more and help solve the problem," she wrote in one tweet.
In response to a skeptical comment she received from a Twitter user about the importance of the issue, Stokes tweeted this morning that "unfortunately, the discussion made the woman he was speaking with feel extremely unsafe, which is how we got here."
