It was the biggest Facebook scandal after the Cambridge Analytica furore, and now the person at the centre of it all, former employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen, is coming to Cambridge to give her version of events.
Ms Haugen, a data engineer, went public last year with tens of thousands of Facebook’s internal documents which she handed over to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal, which published the leaks as ‘The Facebook Files’ series.
During her time at Facebook, Ms Haugen had become increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritising their own profits over public safety and putting people’s lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, she made the courageous decision to blow the whistle on Facebook.
The documents portrayed a dark and dystopian company in which founder Mark Zuckerberg “has unilateral control over 3 billion people”. The Iowa-born scientist called for urgent regulation to hold the tech company’s management to account for the harm its social media platform is doing to society.
She said at the time that “there is no will at the top to make sure these systems are run in an adequately safe way” and added: “Until we bring in a counterweight, these things will be operated for the shareholders’ interest and not the public interest.”
The former Facebook employee then travelled to London in October 2021 to meet the Online Safety Bill committee in London. There, she told MPs that Facebook is “...
MANILA, Philippines — The petition filed by Vice President Sara Duterte seeking to stop impeachment proceedings against her should be junked by the Supreme Court (SC) due to fraudulent claims, Bic...