The Unexpected Tech

Facebook's Top Cop: Joe Sullivan

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world and Joe Sullivan would be head of Homeland Security.

His actual title is chief security officer. The “terrorists” he’s up against include the “Koobface gang,” a quintet of Russians who unleashed a worm that turned ­Facebookers’ computers into enslaved bots; the spammers who flooded the site with violent and pornographic images in ­December; scammers who trick Facebook users into clicking links and filling out surveys for the swindlers’ profit; ­pedo­philes using the site to make contact with minors; and ­scrapers who inappropriately raid Facebook for users’ ­valuable personal information. These scoundrels include those who use malicious apps, hackers and an amateur porn ­purveyor who matches profile pages to private nudie photos submitted by vengeful exes—making it easy to contact, harass and “poke” the unwitting and involuntary porn stars.

The dirt Facebook holds on its users makes it as attractive to cops as to criminals. Among Sullivan’s responsibilities are daily decisions about how much user information to give to law enforcement when it comes calling. And, as a digital nation’s DHS, Sullivan and his team actively police the site for user data worth volunteering to the authorities. Still, he says, “we err on the side of not sharing and have picked quite a few fights over the years.”