Facebook fires intern over his app

Aran Khanna’s app – called Marauder’s Map in tribute to the Harry Potter books – showed that users of Facebook Messenger could pinpoint the exact locations of people they were talking to.

After installing the plugin, users could track the movements of anyone they were in a conversation thread with.

“We don’t dismiss employees for exposing privacy flaws, but we do take it seriously when someone misuses user data and puts people at risk”, Steinfeld said.

This isn’t the first time Facebook’s data sharing has been a point of contention with users: earlier this summer, Facebook received some flak over its facial recognition software, which automatically identifies individuals in a digital image by comparing facial features in the image and database, and allows computers to link a person’s name to their face in photos or videos. It quickly picked up speed, with Facebook itself becoming aware of the extension. My future manager phoned and asked me not to speak to any press; however, I was told that I could keep my blog post up. When his Medium post about Marauder’s Map went up in late May, Facebook contacted him right away and instructed him not to talk to the press, Khanna said. And the company that Mark Zuckerberg famously launched from his Harvard dorm room withdrew its internship offer from this Harvard student, who apparently made the mistake of…launching an app from his dorm room. He was told that he violated the Facebook user agreement when he scraped the site for data. Khan detailed his findings, on Tuesday, in a case study written in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science.

He said “given the fact that using the data from Facebook Messenger is subject to terms and conditions of Facebook, the said usage should have been done only with the prior permission from Facebook”, Duggal told IANS. “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”, Facebook had said in a statement. This information was so revealing, he said, that through a couple weeks’ worth of chat data, he was able to figure out a Facebook friend’s weekly schedule. The head of global human resources and recruiting followed up with an email message stating that my blog post did not reflect the “high ethical standards” around user privacy expected of interns.

Facebook then released an update to its Messenger app a week after the Marauder’s Map was taken down. The app caught the attention of Facebook and Khanna was asked to disable it.

A report by The Indian Express quoted Khanna’s response to the request of Facebook. Facebook released the statement saying that the update of the messenger app was not in result of the Chrome plug-in situation.