Snap's CEO takes shots at Facebook for security, says he's happy for 'wake-up call' on culture

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — The co-founder of Snap, Inc., which has been struggling through a controversial app update and poor performance as a public company, threw some digs at larger rival Facebook while saying he appreciated the "wake-up call" from a former female engineer who blasted the company for a toxic corporate culture.

"If you design something so simple and elegant that the only thing people can do is copy it, as a designer that is the most fantastic thing in the world," said Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, Inc. at the Code conference here.

"We would appreciate it if they would copy our data protection, as well," he said, an apparent reference to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

At the conference, Spiegel was asked to respond to a recent report by news outlet Cheddar of a former female engineer who quit Snap in 2017 and sent a letter to employees complaining of a "toxic," male- dominated culture, such as top executives making penis enlargement jokes and all-male push-up contests in the office.

Spiegel said the letter was a "wake-up" call.

"We need to do even more, and do it even faster," to change the company culture, he said, adding that Snap hired external consultants to study the firm and show Snap where it needed to improve.

"We're proud of the progress we've made in the last 6 months," he said.

Snap has resisted publicly releasing its diversity numbers, a preliminary step now made by most tech companies to hiring and retaining more women and people of color, who represent few of the tech industry's leadership and technical staff. Since before its IPO, Snap had come under fire for racist filters, the augmented reality features users of the app add to their posts.

Facebook repeats apologies

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also spoke late Tuesday at the conference, an annual gathering of tech CEOs and insiders.

Sandberg repeated apologies for allowing the data of an estimated 87 million people to be harvested by political ad targeting firm Cambridge Analytica and vulnerabilities that allowed Russian manipulators to pose as authentic users to try to sway voters during the 2016 election.

It was a tale of two social media companies, one the biggest and most profitable, but under fire from lawmakers that it hasn't done enough to protect its users' data. One of its most vocal critics, Virginia Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, is scheduled to speak at the same conference Wednesday.

On stage, Sandberg and chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer avoided the harder questions posed by Recode's Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka, such as why anyone wasn't fired at Facebook in response to the scandals. Their answers all ended up with different variations of apologies.

"We know it's an arms race," said Sandberg. "We need to protect people using our platform."

She did add that the most important thing Facebook has done on improving the News Feed, which has been a massive source of faked news, is "eat away" at click bait, and focus more on friends and family and less on video, she said.

In the coming months, Facebook wants to prioritize local news, "and make sure people see local news in their news feed."

Online, Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos didn't let Spiegel's jibes go unchecked.

He tweeted that "Snapchat’s implicit promise that photos really disappear combined with poor API security has lead to serious mass leaks of revenge porn. So no, I don’t think copying Snapchat would be a smart move."

A vulnerability in Snapchat's systems allowed hackers to access data on 4.6 million users in 2014.

Snapchat’s implicit promise that photos really disappear combined with poor API security has lead to serious mass leaks of revenge porn. So no, I don’t think copying Snapchat would be a smart move.https://t.co/FSfTA8ry5A — Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) May 30, 2018

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