[alexhill]

> They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know.

You're right. If the questions were being asked of someone who was genuinely motivated to answer them, this wouldn't be an obstacle.

The phrase "all your personal data" (or the quote from the article, "every bit of data associated with a given user account") feels vague and imprecise only if you have an internal understanding that for practical purposes, it really is impossible. The Facebook engineers know that and everyone here knows that. It's not literally impossible - an internal team of digital archaeologists with unlimited resources and no deadline might be able to do it for a single user. But practically impossible across the whole userbase.

If you were genuinely interested in providing insight to the hearing, you could explain all that, and then explain how you could go about creating a rough sketch of an answer, and how you'd go about adding some detail to that sketch.

The Facebook engineers have no real motivation to provide insight off their own bat. They can take the question literally, and answer honestly that they don't know, that nobody else knows, and that it's probably impossible TO know. I'm not even sure if this is acting in bad faith. I can easily imagine feeling cagey in this situation, and responding as such. Experiencing an emotion isn't acting in bad faith.

All that said...these questions were asked by a court-appointed subject matter expert. Either the subject matter expert is not the right person for the job, or...and now I realise that of course I haven't read the transcript and there's every chance that what's quoted in the article is not the most insight the court managed to prise out of the engineers. posting anyway in 3 2 1