Careless People Study Guide

Sarah Wynn-Williams was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. As a teenager, one of her formative experiences was being bitten by a shark while on vacation with her family, after which she nearly died. Later, after working for several years in diplomatic jobs, she joined Facebook in 2011. Her time at Facebook was one of massive growth and expansion for the company but also significant controversy, including the website’s role in affecting the results of elections, such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Facebook terminated Wynn-Williams in 2017, supposedly for poor performance, although she has claimed that it was actually in retaliation for her reporting the sexual harassment of her boss, Joel Kaplan. Wynn-Williams would expand on these claims, as well as other even more sweeping allegations about wrongdoing at Facebook in her 2025 memoir Careless People. The book was an immediate bestseller in spite of efforts by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to suppress sales. Wynn-Williams has three children and continues to work in the field of technology policy.

Although Sarah Wynn-Williams is originally from New Zealand, most of this book is about her time in the United States, where she worked during the second Obama administration and first Trump administration. This period was one of increased concern about privacy online and how governments and corporations were surveilling people. The most famous whistleblower of the era was Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA who in 2013 revealed the extent of global surveillance, including how the United States was spying on its own citizens. The year 2013 was also the year of the death of Aaron Schwartz, an activist who supported a more open internet and whose idealistic hopes for technology were similar to those that Wynn-Williams had when she first joined Facebook with the goal of making a difference in the world. The book also alludes to human rights abuses in China that made Wynn-Williams hesitant to help with Facebook’s plans to give China greater surveillance capabilities. One example of this is the persecution of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority living in China. This persecution, which the government of China formally denies, involves mass surveillance, arrests, torture, family separation, sexual violence, and depriving people of reproductive rights. Some observers have categorized it as a genocide.

Facebook has been the subject of several books, many of them portraying the company in a negative light. Two noteworthy examples include Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy and An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia King. These books differ from Careless People in that they are written by technology journalists instead of by a former Facebook employee. Perhaps the most well-known portrayal of Facebook in popular culture is David Fincher’s film The Social Network, which was adapted by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin from the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. Another memoir that deals with technology, privacy, and whistleblowing is Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, who worked at the National Security Agency and exposed the extent to which the United States was spying on both foreign and domestic targets. One of the most noteworthy books mentioned in Careless People is Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, whom Wynn-Williams worked with and knew personally. The book sold heavily and was a pop culture phenomenon, although even at the time it faced heavy criticism, with writers such as bell hooks characterizing it as pseudo-feminism based on flawed premises.