Student developer loses Facebook internship for exposing a security flaw

Aran Khanna’s developed Google chrome plugin Marauder’s Map lets the users of Facebook Messenger to figure out the geographical location of their location with everyone they message with by default.

The Harvard students days later, Facebook asked Khanna to disable it. A week after that, Facebook released a Messenger app update addressing the flaw. “However, it seems locations are still being shared on the mobile app and sharing is still enabled by default”, he said in May.

He said he received an email saying “my blog post did not reflect the “high ethical standards” around user privacy expected of interns”.

“This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety”, Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld told Boston.com. Facebook’s top priority is serving the community with safe and secure services, and the creator of this tool could not cope with that.

Khanna published his findings in a case study in peer-reviewed academic journal Technology Science.

Third-year Harvard University student Aran Khanna had it made: secured an internship at Facebook, created a Chrome browser extension, and highlighted potential privacy concern lurking in his soon-to-be employer’s messaging system – the latter of which caused weeks of controversy that cost him an opportunity with the world’s largest social media company.

Business Insider has reached out to Facebook for comment and will update when it responds.

The location of the users was automatically shared by the Facebook Messenger app with anyone whom the user messaged.

According to Khanna’s project summary, he was supposed to start a summer internship at Facebook on June 1. Could this work have been done inside Facebook to understand how its users view the collection and sharing of their data?

The day after Marauder’s Map was posted, Khanna said his future manager at Facebook called him and asked him not to talk to the press.

But Khanna’s conclusion about the Messenger app “is revisionist history that conveniently omits a few important points”.

Facebook’s treatment of Khanna is drawing criticism as it appears to fall into the “do as I say not as I do” category.

“Hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done”, he wrote in his first letter to investors in 2012.

“I decided to write this extension because we are constantly being told how we are losing privacy with the increasing digitization of our lives”, Khanna wrote in the post.

However, Khanna is not that all unhappy. He spent the summer interning at a Silicon Valley startup and said the back-and-forth with Facebook ended up being a learning experience as well.

But not too bold.