Frances Haugen

Frances Haugen (born 1983 or 1984) is an American product manager, data engineer, scientist, and whistleblower. She disclosed tens of thousands of Facebook's internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021.

Haugen has also testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee's Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the European Parliament. In 2023, her memoir, The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook, was published by Little, Brown & Company.

Haugen was raised in Iowa City, Iowa, where she attended Horn Elementary and Northwest Junior High School, and graduated from Iowa City West High School in 2002. Her father was a doctor, and her mother became an Episcopalian priest after an academic career.

Haugen studied electrical and computer engineering in the founding class at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and graduated in 2006. She later earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 2011.

In 2006, after graduating from college, Haugen was hired by Google, and worked on Google Ads, Google Book Search, on a class action litigation settlement related to Google's publication of copyrighted book content, as well as on Google+. At Google, Haugen co-authored a patent for a method of adjusting the ranking of search results. During her career at Google, she completed her MBA; her tuition was paid by Google. While at Google, she was a technical co-founder of the desktop dating app Secret Agent Cupid, precursor to the mobile app Hinge.

In 2015, she began work as a data product manager at Yelp to improve search using image recognition, and after a year, moved to Pinterest.

In 2019, Haugen joined Facebook, after a person close to her became radicalized online; she "felt compelled to take an active role in creating a better, less toxic Facebook" and thought "Facebook has the potential to bring out the best of us". When Facebook recruited her, she expressed interest in a role related to misinformation; in 2019 she became a product manager on the Facebook civic integrity team.

Following the 2020 United States elections, Facebook dissolved its civic integrity team, and Haugen became disillusioned. While still at Facebook, she decided to become a whistleblower, due to what she has since described as a pattern of Facebook's prioritization of profit over public safety, and left Facebook in May 2021.