Facebook Employees Receive Sauron Security Alert When Their Accounts Get Accessed By Fellow Employees

According to recent reports from Wall Street Journal, "Sauron alert" is the security alert that a Facebook employee would get if any of the colleagues access his/her profile on Facebook. The alert would notify the concerned employee that "someone is accessing your profile in facebook" through email or a notification in Facebook. The term is referred to all-seeing eye Sauron in the "Lord of the Rings". The facility is now available only for Facebook employees and the company would extend it to general users of Facebook soon but it has real-world problems and many factors need to be considered while testing and implementation, a Facebook spokesperson said.

Already a small group of Facebook employees have been granted access to access private information of other colleagues to monitor the behaviour, debugging errors, testing new features and solving other technical issues. They can enter their account by logging in as another user. Now, Sauron alert is introduced to notify the fellow employees regarding the access to their account by Facebook engineers.

News critics pointed out the issue that the general users of Facebook could not be able to know their account getting accessed by Facebook employees. Also, a Facebook security engineer has been recently fired for stalking a woman who is a software engineer following Tinder interaction. She approached a Spyglass employee and made a complaint against the unnamed Facebook's security engineer and the complaint was open to the public on April 30 following that the investigation was made and the cpncerned was terminated on May 2.

Following the screwing of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by US law makers in Cambridge Analytica scandal regarding illegal data mining, the data privacy of Facebook users have become the most discussed and Facebook's security was criticized. Facebook has been gradually taking steps to cover up the bad remark by improving the privacy settings in its own products and making policy changes.

Recently, Facebook announced a new 'Clear History' button that allows the users to know about the websites and apps to which their private information is shared and if needed thay can delete it just like clearing browsing history.