TORONTO – Facebook has revoked an internship offer to Harvard student Aran Khanna after he created an app using Facebook Messenger data that allowed users to see the location of their Facebook friends to within a metre.
The extension, dubbed Marauders Map, used data sent out by default every time someone sends a message on Facebook Messenger.
Khanna said he created the app to prove a point – that the average web user is sharing a shocking amount of data with companies like Facebook.
Turns out, Facebook wasn’t too happy with his point.
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.
Facebook revoked the internship because Khanna violated the social network’s user agreement when he scraped the site for data to create the app, Khanna said. 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.”
“This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety,” a Facebook spokesman told Boston.com.
“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,” the spokesman said.
READ MORE: Creepy app lets Facebook Messenger users pinpoint your location
- Enter at your own risk: New home security camera aims paintballs at intruders
- Boston Dynamics unveils ‘creepy’ new fully electric humanoid robot
- Ontario First Nation calls for chemical plant to be shut down amid ‘dangerously high’ benzene levels
- Ottawa looks to launch national flood insurance program within 12 months
In a post on Medium, Khanna explained that Facebook uses longitude and latitude coordinates to five decimal places which, he says, can accurately place a person to within a metre of their location.
The data also includes timestamps which means the app can (if a person is constantly using Facebook Messenger) track a person’s location throughout the day.
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 company defended its policy to track locations in a statement saying “people share their location to better connect with their friends on Messenger.”
“We’ve been listening to people’s feedback and for the last few months have been working hard to improve this experience. We will be rolling out improvements very soon. In the meantime, people can still choose to turn off location sharing at any time by tapping the blue arrow in the message composer,” Facebook said.
Khanna maintains that he did not design the app to be malicious.
The Harvard student ended up interning for a Silicon Valley startup instead of Facebook, telling Boston.com the experience with Facebook ended up being an “internship experience” that taught him a lot about the industry.
– With files from James Armstrong
Comments