Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen

"Steven Levy: When I first saw your face in the promo for 60 Minutes I thought back to that 2007 trip. If I were to guess which one of those 18 associate product managers would become a whistleblower, it would have been you. You struck me as a little different— everyone else was locked into a standard Silicon Valley career path. But you were talking about going to graduate school. You also had a sixth sense for injustice. Does that sound right to you?

Frances Haugen: I probably had a broader education than a lot of the other APMs. They had relatively consistent CVs—they went to Stanford and had CS degrees. I went to Olin, which was a brand-new engineering school; I was part of the first graduating class there. I took a bunch of humanities classes. I had done high school debate, and I coached in college. One of the goals of a liberal arts education is to establish who you are as a person. And one of the unfortunate things about how engineering is often taught now is that they fill people's schedules so full with requirements that you lose some of that self-definition period that college is traditionally about. I feel very grateful that I had that experience because it gives you a chance to kind of establish how you make decisions, and what is important to you. You can be externally defined, or you can be internally defined. Still, I wouldn't say that I was a super outsider. I loved Google. But I did probably have a little bit more context." (Wired, 29 November 21)