Facebook Cancels Internship For Harvard Student That Pointed Out Privacy Flaw

Boston.com reports that Harvard Student Aran Khanna was two hours away from leaving to go start his summer internship at Facebook when they called him and rescinded their initiation.

Khanna had created an application that was available as a Chrome extension. This application, called Marauder’s Map, used data from Facebook Messenger to create a map of where people were when they sent messages from Facebook Messenger. This pointed out a privacy flaw that the Facebook Messenger app has had since it was launched. It automatically shared users’ locations with anyone who they messaged.

Facebook allegedly asked Khanna to disable the app and he complied with their request. That didn’t stop Facebook from reportedly removing him from their summer internship before he even started.

“This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety,” Steinfeld 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.”

Khanna thought he was being vigilant by informing people on how their personal information was being utilized.

“I didn’t write the program to be malicious,” he said.

Luckily, Khanna was accepted into another internship and is considering the entire ordeal with Facebook a learning experience.

-Saher K: OTG Team