Facebook stores user tracking data in a separate system it refuses to expose

Evidence

In March 2018, fifteen months after his initial request, Dehaye finally received an e-mail from Facebook’s Privacy Operations Team. He was told that the information he sought “is not available through our self-service tools” but is stored in “Hive,” Facebook’s “log storage area,” where it is retained for “data analytics” and maintained as separate from “the data bases that power the Facebook site.” The company insisted that accessing the data required it to surmount “huge technical challenges.” “This data,” the company writes, “is also not used to directly serve the live Facebook website which users experience.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1542

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete evidence for the shadow text / second text concept that echoes Zuboff’s earlier chapters on Iago’s whisper and the two-text economy. — connects to: Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 114; Facebook’s FTC settlement only redirected its surveillance practices into new tracking methods — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 500; The tracking ID persists even after users opt out of targeted ads. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 523
• SHARE: Send to anyone working on GDPR/access rights enforcement — the fifteen-month timeline and ‘huge technical challenges’ dodge exemplify corporate data-access obstruction.