Indian origin Harvard student Aran Khanna has been denied a chance to intern at Facebook after the company realised his browser extension revealed privacy flaws in its Messenger service. Khanna released his Marauder's Map, an extension that used location date to show exactly where your friends are. IT was downloaded 85,000 times in mere 3 days before Facebook asked him to disable it. The app “capitalised on a privacy flaw that Facebook had been aware of for about three years: the Facebook Messenger app automatically shared users' locations with anyone who they messaged,” a report said.
Khanna was later informed by a Facebook employee that the company was revoking his summer internship offer, as he had violated its user agreement when he scraped the site for location data. Facebook also disabled location sharing from desktops and subsequently updated Messenger for mobile, giving users the option to control their GPS data. Prior to that, the app had been sharing users’ locations by default since it launched in 2011. He also received an email from Facebook’s head of global human resources and recruiting, who told him that his Medium post didn’t meet the high ethical standards expected of interns.
A company spokesperson told the media, “This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety. Despite being asked repeatedly to remove the code, the creator of this tool left it up. This is wrong and it’s inconsistent with how we think about serving our community.”
The student has accepted internship with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley and detailed the experience in a case study titled 'Facebook's Privacy Incident Response: A study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger' in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science.
