Has Zuckerberg lost his appetite for fresh ideas?
By Raif Karerat
Follow @ambazaarmag
WASHINGTON, DC: Facebook canceled a Harvard student’s internship after he created a Google Chrome plugin that highlighted serious privacy flaws in the social network’s messaging service, according to a report by Boston.com.
Aran Khanna, a student developer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a Chrome extension called the Marauder’s Map that trawls for location data from Facebook Messenger and uses it to plot the locations of anyone in a group chat to within three feet, friend or not.
“I decided to write this extension, because we are constantly being told how we are losing privacy with the increasing digitization of our lives, however the consequences never seem tangible,” Khanna previously wrote on Medium. “With this code you can see for yourself the potentially invasive usage of the information you share, and decide for yourself if this is something you should worry about.”
Khanna tweeted about the app on May 26 and posted about it on Reddit and Medium.
Within three days, Facebook asked Khanna to disable the app. The company then took the measure of deactivating location sharing from desktops.
“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,” wrote Boston.com.
Three days after the extension was posted, and two hours before he was supposed to leave to start his internship, Khanna received a call from the offices of Facebook telling him that the company was rescinding his summer internship offer. Khanna said he was told that he violated the Facebook user agreement when he scraped the site for data.
However, Khanna told Boston.com that the data was from his own messages, which meant he used information accessible to all Facebook users, not just to employees.
Khanna detailed the experience in a case study published Tuesday for the Harvard Journal of Technology Science and told Boston.com he created the app to show the consequences of unintentionally sharing data. That way, he said, users could decide for themselves whether or not it was a violation of their privacy.
“I didn’t write the program to be malicious,” he attested.
3 Comments
Better still..I hope he starts his own Facebook like Zuckerberg did.
I really hope that he would get back his internship!
Me too!