A secret gift. What was spent $320 million in donations from Facebook's top manager? 

Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $1.6 billion, is a generous benefactor. But here's the thing: her donations aren't transparent

During 2019, Sheryl Sandberg donated a total of $127 million to two of her charities. "My donations this year help support and inspire women around the world through LeanIn.Org, help people facing loss grow stronger through OptionB.Org, and provide financial support and assistance to mentors to diligent college students through the Dave Goldberg Scholars Program, which pays homage to my husband's legacy," Sandberg said in an official statement to Forbes. 

But analysis of public documents shows that most of her donations since 2015 - $230 million in Facebook shares - have been donated to donor funds: this controversial organizational form is equivalent to black box donations. Moreover, so far only a small proportion of her donations have actually been received by LeanIn and OptionB.

LeanIn supports women and emerged after sandberg's 2013 book, "Don't Be Afraid to Act. A woman, work and the will to lead." LeanIn has helped create 45,000 circles in 172 countries around the world that give women space to exchange ideas and mutual support. Sandberg founded OptionB in 2017 after the release of her second book, "Plan B. How to Survive Unhappiness, Get Ready for Strength and Start Living Again," written after the sudden death of her husband Dave Goldberg, age 47, in 2015. OptionB, which helps people get stronger, also conducts support groups and offers educational materials and research for people facing personal difficulties and loss.

From 2013 to 2017, LeanIn and OptionB received $12 million from Sandberg through The Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation. It is a family operating fund, which means that it exists solely to fund LeanIn and OptionB. He doesn't donate to outside charities. 

According to the 2017 fund tax return, the most current of the available, $3.3 million was transferred to LeanIn and $3.5 million to OptionB. The foundation also spent another $1.2 million on communications and more than $300,000 in royalties from Megan Rooney, a former author of speeches by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

"It seems that an impressive portion of what is being done is actually being used for public relations," says Alan Cantor, a consultant in the nonprofits. "It's worth asking if it's all about working on Cheryl's image."

Beth Parker, communications director at the Sandberg Foundation, says communication is an important part of LeanIn's work because its main goal is education. "LeanIn was founded to fight gender stereotypes," Parker explains. "We don't provide direct support like other nonprofits. We focus on communications because education is central to our mission."

Still, it remains unclear where the remaining hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Sandberg were spent. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sandberg has donated $230 million in Facebook shares to donor funds since 2015. Her representative claims that Sandberg donated more during her life and that this amount is "significantly higher", but Forbes has not been able to independently verify the claim. However, if LeanIn and OptionB were only transferred $12 million, there is still $218 million, the truth of which we may never know. This lack of transparency about the ultimate goal of donations is one of the main drawbacks of donor funds (FDF).

"Money can simply be stored there or used for controversial projects that "Cheryl" would not like to advertise," Cantor says.

The FDF has also been criticized for its extremely flexible requirements. There are no rules establishing when and to what extent donors can transfer assets to the FDF. But it still allows virtues to receive large tax breaks for what is considered a gift to a charitable foundation. Sandberg has been handing over Facebook shares to FDF every November in the last four years out of five.

"Can you imagine what would happen if all this money were transferred to organizations that are really doing their job? Cantor asks. "People who run nonprofits, that is, people who really feed children, provide housing for families, do research, do amateur theaters, they hate donor funding. Because now the big donors are grabbing at the FDF instead of giving them $10,000 or $100,000 a year." 

Sandberg may regularly donate money from her FDF, but it's equally likely that she doesn't. Parker, of the Sandberg Foundation, declined to say how much Facebook's top executive donates to nonprofits each year from its FDF. And in the absence of more transparent reporting from such charities, the public will never know how much and to whom it has donated.

In late 2018, Sandberg began diversifying her philanthropic strategy when she announced the creation of the Sandberg Goldberg Charitable Support Fund. This is a grant support fund, that is, it must annually transfer financial statements to the authorities and donate 5% of the assets to charities. More than a year has passed since Sandberg announced the foundation' creation, but it still does not have a website. Moreover, a tax return describing the grants granted by the Foundation is likely to be available only in 2021.

According to Parker, the new foundation will "further promote Cheryl's charitable work. It focused on projects related to women's support and gender equality, education and poverty reduction." In 2019, Sandberg donated $87 million in cash and securities to the new fund, a gift that became known only when Forbes asked about another donation sandberg found in public documents: a transfer of $41 million in Facebook shares to the FDF.

This year, other sandberg donations were reported, in addition to those made to LeanIn and OptionB, including a $1 million donation to Planned Parenthood to fund education and a commitment to pay $2.5 million to the Anti-Defamation League in October to fight hate and prejudice in the U.S. and Europe.

Only time, tax audit, possibly financial intelligence, will be able to eventually find out where the money 💰 And here is the 2016 presidential election? What does Cambridge Analytics have to do with it and Putin? 

And how these 💰 will be used by the Americans. The editors want to hope that the creation of a new fund, which exists not only to finance its two non-profit organizations, but also other interesting projects, will become a transparent chapter in the life of this criminal person - Sandberg.

The girl was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., the eldest of three children in a Jewish family. His parents are Adel Einhorn, an English teacher, and an ophthalmologist, Joel Sandberg, who was a pro-Soviet Jewish activist in the 1970s and was detained in Chisinau in 1975 and expelled from the Soviet Union. The family moved to North Miami Beach when Cheryl was two years old. At school, Cheryl was "always the best in the class", and in high school in the 1980s she was engaged in aerobics.

2012

Compromat.Ru

 Mark Zuckerberg

 British newspaper The Daily Mail spoke about the book of a former employee of Facebook. Catherine Loss, who lifted the veil over the sex life, immorality and secrets of the world's largest social network and its "little emperor" Mark Zuckerberg, reports InoPressa.ru. The publication of the book coincided with another scandal around Facebook: the social network, without permission, erased the addresses of its users: in order to force them to use its own e-mail. Facebook has so far, as far as is known, refrained from commenting on the book.

 Loss joined Facebook in 2005 with 51 employees, including her, and later became a speechwriter for the head of the company. She left the company in 2010. Her work is entitled The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Katherine Losse.

 Facebook is considered one of the most dynamic companies in history, but according to Loss, until very recently, it was distinguished by "deep sexism and a mentality of the 1950s," retells the book by journalist Daniel Bates, author of the first article in The Daily Mail.

 Loss said the women in the company were in lower positions. "They were treated like second-class servants, they were admitted to conferences only as cloakroom attendants," the newspaper writes.

 Loss compares Zuckerberg to Napoleon. "She declares him the" little emperor "who set up a company where employees were supposed to" worship him like an idol. On the day of his 22nd birthday, the employees were even ordered to wear T-shirts with his portrait, "the article says.

 The newspaper quotes several quotes. "About one of the few married engineers on our team, his female colleagues found out (after he made them some unwanted offers) that he was inviting ordinary employees of the company to have a threesome with him ..." - writes Loss in his book ...

 “When one employee complained that a coworker told her in line in the cafeteria that her buttocks looked delicious (he said, 'I want to run my teeth in your ass”), Mark asked (unclear, feigned or genuinely naive): “What do these words mean anyway? "- says Loss.

 "The entire architecture of human resources in the company was built on the reactionary model of the office of the 1950s, where men with so-called masculine qualities (ability to technique, a tendency to break everything, to move quickly) were idealized, considering geniuses and visionaries, and everyone else (especially employees of the department working with users, which was dominated by women and worked by blacks, as opposed to whites and Asians in the programming team) were considered dumb, unable to think smartly and quickly, "complains Loss. According to her, the situation changed only with the arrival of Sherrill Sandberg, who in 2009 became the chief operating officer.

 The journalist claims: "Loss's book has given Zuckerberg the most derogatory characterization since the movie" The Social Network. "Loss portrays him as a person who does not know how to communicate and is aloof, claims that those who are not fixated on programming, he does not consider people." ... Here's a description from Loss's book: Zuckerberg paced the office, "his chest puffed out like a Napoleonic, and his curls on his forehead bounced as if heralding his arrival."

 The dark side of Facebook

 The second article, dedicated to the revelatory opus Loss, tells about the dark secrets not of the company, but of the social network itself, - "Secret profiles, passwords, Facebook lockpicks ... and the application" Pretty or Ugly ": the book of the former employee describes the" unhealthy "cravings Zuckerberg to total domination. "

 "As stated in the book, Facebook developed an experimental" Dark Profiles "option - secret accounts of people who did not even register on the network. Programmers wanted to create shadow pages for those who were tagged in photos by their friends - they hoped that they would succumb to the temptation and will have their own accounts, "- writes journalist Daniel Bates, referring to Loss.

 "The book also claims that in 2007, Facebook technicians worked on a Judgebox program that would allow users to compare and rate women. It's an echo of the sexist Facemash app that Zuckerberg developed when he was at Harvard," the article says.

 The newspaper retells a few more of Loss's statements: "Facebook employees have a program called Facebook Stalker that allows them to track who logged into their profiles. At an early stage, employees were given a" passcode "without any security checks, and they were allowed to do whatever will climb into my head. "

 The trick with "dark profiles" reminded Loss of the Mormons: "they convert the dead, they say, if they had learned about Mormonism during their lifetime, they would have believed."

 Loss also cites the words of one of Zuckerberg's colleagues: “Mark always dreamed of a sort of“ Wikipedia ”of humanity, about“ dark Facebook ”, as he put it, where every person would have a wall, and people could write everything about him on this wall. whatever ".

 "Loss also says that she was shocked when she was given a lockpick password - the password for a Facebook account called The Creator, through which you could look into the profile of any person," - said in the article. "They gave me the password without asking about my past - what if I'm a maniac and hunt people down?" Loss exclaims.

 What Facebook knows about its users - and who it tells

 Recall that the specific understanding of privacy on Facebook is no longer news, and, in fairness, we note that users themselves have given their consent to the social network.

 Further evidence that "Facebook knows about you" came in April this year, when a leak from the Boston Police Department allowed the American public to find out what a typical Facebook user profile, provided to police at the request of law enforcement, looks like. It was a set of documents that Facebook sent in response to a prosecutor's request for a user named Philip Markoff. Of course, the documents are strictly confidential and should not have become publicly available, but it still happened.

 The 23-year-old medical student dossier contains 71 pages. Among other things, it found a list of all incoming and outgoing private messages, printouts of all photos uploaded by other users, where Markoff's face was recognized, as well as information about Markoff's visits to Facebook (date, time, IP address). This, by the way, is far from complete information collected about Markoff by the largest social network in the world, but only the data that the prosecutor asked to provide.

 Earlier, in July 2009, the tech blog Ars Technica published an article about the fate of the "deleted" photos, which the company does not physically remove from its servers. By the way, from a legal point of view, there can be no claims here, since certain rights to personal photos, in accordance with the user agreement, belong to Facebook.

 In particular, the company has the right to distribute photographs of its members on the Internet. In July 2009, Facebook promised to fix the "backup storage time" issue on its CDN partner's servers. However, a year later, everything remained the same, and in early 2012, the media again wrote that the photos deleted from Facebook are still stored on servers. Now it is at least clear why.

NEWSru.com, 26.09.2011, "Facebook constantly monitors users, even when they are not authorized": Facebook's social network constantly monitors users, collecting their data, even when the user is not authorized in the system. 

Hacker Nick Kubrilovich, after analyzing the http headlines of requests sent by browsers to facebook.com, revealed the presence of modified cookies appearing after the release of the Facebook page. 

These files contain all the information that is necessary for authorization on the social network, which allows Facebook professionals to distinguish one user from another when collecting information about it. 

And by clicking the "Exit" button on their Facebook page, the user actually stays online - just some cookies are replaced by others, which creates the appearance of an exit. 

Users do not even suspect that the Facebook network continues to collect all the information it needs about a user - which sites it goes to, what services he uses and where he is currently located, when it comes to mobile access. 

As zDnet notes, while Facebook is working hard to improve its image, such information reminds users again that their personal data is not confidential at all. 

Recall that in August this year, German government officials were advised to stop using Facebook. The Center for the Protection of Privacy in Germany issued a statement stating that the management of the social network transfers personal information about users to third parties in the United States. "Facebook users should know that they are being tracked by the company," the center said, noting that this is a violation of the EU's law on the protection of personal information. "K.ru' inset