Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook protects itself against leaks by tracking down the leakers and firing them.

One Facebook employee who anonymously spoke with Wired recently asked the reporter to turn off his phone so the company couldn’t track their location.

To corporate giants like Facebook, leaks to rivals or the media are a cardinal sin.

That notion was clear in a new Wired story about Facebook’s rocky time over the past two years. The story talks about how Facebook was able to find two leakers who told a Gizmodo reporter about its news operations.

But one source for the Wired story highlighted just how concerned employees were about the way their company would go after leakers. According to the story, the source, a current Facebook employee, asked a Wired reporter to turn off his phone so Facebook wouldn’t be able to use location tracking and see that the two were close to each other for the meeting.

From the Wired feature:

“One current employee asked that a Wired reporter turn off his phone so the company would have a harder time tracking whether it had been near the phones of anyone from Facebook.”

Whether Facebook actually does track its employees this way doesn’t matter. The fact an employee would think such an option was on the table is telling of the culture at the company.

You can read the full profile on Wired.

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