Aran Khanna an Indian origin Harvard students internship at Facebook has been revoked three months ago as and when a browser application called Marauder’s map which uses data from Facebook Messenger to map where users were when they were sending messages, a report said.
Advertisement
That order was reiterated later that evening, when the global communications lead for privacy and public policy called to stress once again that he should not speak to the press, saying that the objective “was to hamper and spread what had become a damaging story.”
“I complied with Facebook’s requests, as they pertained to each my interactions with the media and the dealing with of the code, each step of the best way”, Khanna informed IANS in an e mail response, including: “My intentions have been by no means malicious; I merely sought to attract consideration to a privateness problem that I knew many individuals have been unaware of”.
A week after publishing the post, Facebook updated the Messenger app, removing the always-on location sharing feature that allowed Marauders Map’s to work.
The case study of the entire issue has been detailed by Mr.Khanna in the Harvard Journal of technology science.
“His (Khanna’s) mapping tool scrapped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety”, Facebook said.
Three days after he launched it via a Medium post, Khanna disabled the plugin after Facebook told him to.
Facebook maintains that they were already working location sharing fix and Aran scraped their data that violated their terms, putting users’ privacy at risk. Facebook’s top priority is serving the community with safe and secure services, and the creator of this tool could not cope with that.
The extension, dubbed Marauders Map, used data sent out by default every time someone sends a message on Facebook Messenger. Facebook’s head of global human resources and recruiting also contacted him to explain that he “didn’t meet the high ethical standards expected of interns”.
In an interview with Boston.com, Khanna said within three days of releasing the app Facebook withdrew its internship offer, despite his cooperation in disabling it.
As reports state, Khanna was asked multiple times to remove the extension, but he left it up.
“It is possible that before my extension and blog post, the degree of location data collection and sharing by Facebook Messenger was hard for an average user to notice and thus did not raise significant concern”.
Advertisement
Despite the snub from Facebook, Khanna managed to secure another internship with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley, saying that his experience with the social media behemoth turned out to be an “internship experience” in itself, teaching him valuable information about the real world.
