An interesting find by Jack McKenna at TechCrunch is the inability to block Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the social networking site.
With 500 million users and growing, it is the largest collection of people in ‘one place’ that the world has ever seen. Yet the one person immune to being blocked by a user appears to be the founder and chief executive.
If a user goes to Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile page and hits the “Report/block” button at the bottom of the left hand side, when attempting to block Zuckerberg the user will find that the action cannot be completed through a “general block failure error”. This occurs on no other profile.
It’s a nondescript message which gives no information as to why this is the case. Though many TechCrunch readers believe it to be an Easter egg or a way of Facebook “adding personality to the site”, I would not be surprised if this was indeed by design.
While many of us are concerned with individual’s privacy settings and the access rights to ‘everyone’, many appear to overlook the fact that ordinary people are employed to run, develop, continue and maintain the site. These are ordinary people with the same feelings, emotions, curiosities and psychological urges as we all posses.
Given half the chance, wouldn’t you want to read the inbox of a celebrity or world leader if you knew they had an account?
I’m not saying for one minute that Facebook employees do, and one can only presume, let alone hope that internal policies are there to prevent staff from accessing accounts and in doing so, maintain the highest level of privacy possible.
But we as ordinary users and in some case consumers of the site, we will never have a straight, definitive answer.
When Facebook gets a report through from a user concerning abuse, bullying, harassment or suchlike, there will be carefully selected employees which are trusted to investigate such infringements. This will undertake case-by-case investigations by searching the appropriate areas of a person’s profile to detect whether a user is in fact in breach of the site rules or even the law. The more specific information a victim can give, the less likelihood of an investigator stepping over the privacy line by being directed exactly where to look and nowhere else.
Law enforcement however can be granted read-only access to a person’s profile, settings, private messages and similar if it is deemed necessary to identify a suspect or indeed a victim. Missing or vulnerable people, or even those who have absconded from prison for example can be assisted by Facebook to gather evidence or intelligence as to their whereabouts.
So this brings me onto Zuckerberg. While it isn’t far fetched to suggest that the chief executive and public figure of the world’s largest social network has a ‘God’ account, which allows him unlimited or unrestricted access to any area of the site, it probably isn’t one hundred percent the case.
If he was, he probably wouldn’t have it tied into his personal profile’s login and password - just to be on the safe side. There will always be a paper trail somewhere, and if the contents of the privacy dumpbucket was to hit the fan, it would probably not work so well in his favour to be directly linked to such infringements.
