Though Sandberg may get most of her name recognition from Lean In — her 2013 blockbuster book encouraging women to take charge in the workplace — her most significant and complicated legacy may be the tech industry’s reliance on personalized advertising, which created both profits and complex nightmares at immense scale.
Sandberg was one of the people who made Google’s ad business so enormous that it became an essential part of every advertiser’s budget. Then, after she joined Facebook in 2008, four years after it was created, she brought that same self-service model to the social networking company, now called Meta Platforms Inc. Instead of targeting users based on their search queries like Google did, Facebook could target based on what it gleaned of their personal identities, connections and interests. An entire industry of other tech companies followed suit with business models that offered products for free and made money off of users’ personal data instead. “Sheryl had a front-row seat at the two largest and most successful advertising platforms in history,” said Patrick Keane, the chief executive officer of Action Network, a sports media firm, who worked with Sandberg at Google in the early aughts. Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W Baird & Co., wrote that Sandberg’s lasting impact is the success of that advertising model: “Her legacy, in our view, is that Meta has one of the strongest business models in the digital economy.”
In recent years, Sandberg’s public image was tarnished alongside the mounting criticisms against Facebook, where she was widely seen as a powerful No. 2 executive. Her expertise in legal, operations and policy complemented chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s preference for product, engineering and forward-looking technologies like virtual reality. In its earlier years, the social network was praised for its size and its “move fast and break things” disruptor attitude, but over time, it was increasingly rebuked for its failure to rein in large-scale misinformation, hate speech, privacy breaches, and lies from political dictators on its ever-expanding online platforms.
Lawmakers frequently hauled Sandberg and Zuckerberg in front of Congress to interrogate them on, among other things, foreign interference in elections and losing track of users’ personal data. The scandals never seemingly stopped: fomenting ethnic violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, allowing violent video and pandemic misinformation to go viral, and abetting the organisation of a right-wing insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021. Sandberg was personally critiqued by Facebook employees for surrounding herself with trusted lieutenants who filtered bad news, and failing to address problems until they developed into public crises — and then treating them as reputational.
 "Sheryl Sandberg")