Harvard student loses Facebook internship for app that exposed flaws

What you should keep in mind is that the mobile app for Facebook Messenger defaults to sending a location with all messages.

He tweeted about his app and posted about it on Medium on May 26.

His big break ended before it began when he took it too far for Facebook.

How can geeks across the globe miss out such an incredible handy plugin which allowed them to explore their ways on Facebook. However, within three days, Facebook asked Khanna to disable the app and then withdrew its internship offer to him, the report said.

After being accepted for an internship at Facebook, Harvard University student Aran Khanna continued to embrace the same entrepreneurial spirit that helped launch the site on the very same campus over a decade ago.

The description didn’t mention the previous default settings.

Facebook told Boston.com it had been working on such an update long before the blog post came out.

“This isn’t the sort of thing that can happen in a week”, Steinfeld said.

Khanna published his findings in a case study in peer-reviewed academic journal Technology Science. CNET drew attention to the issue in 2012 and showed users how to switch off location services.

Khanna was also contacted by Facebook’s head of global human resources and recruiting, who told him that his post on Medium went against the company’s ethical standards expected from interns.

Facebook rescinded a student’s summer internship offer after the candidate hacked a privacy loophole on the social media network, according to a report.

Following his reveal of the Facebook security flaw, the company cancelled an internship that he was going to take with it. It claims the nature of his blog, where he shared information about his extension, was the reason.

Within days Facebook also launched an update to the app that promised “a brand new way to send a location as part of a conversation in Messenger” using a map, but completely skirted over the fact users had been doing this for years, in a less polished and often inadvertent way.

However, before it was disabled, the extension was downloaded more than 85,000 times and “shared on over 200 publications”, according to Khanna.

Khanna saw it as a serious privacy oversight, but Facebook contended it was a purposeful feature intended to help friends share their lives.

Matt Steinfeld, a Facebook spokesman, said that the mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated its terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety.

Khanna was not just asked to remove the extension, but he was also asked not to speak about it to the media. He insists the extension was not meant to be malicious, he made it in response to always hearing how we’re losing our privacy.