Three months ago Aran Khanna, Harvard student, was preparing to kick off one of the most exciting moments of his life: he began an internship at Facebook. Missed opportunity and a unique experience. But Aran Khanna has not even got to start: the contract was terminated by the social media after the boy has identified a defect in the privacy of the social network angering the upper reaches of the giant.
It all started in the room his dorm: Aran has developed an application, named Marauder’s Map, which allows you to map users through the data of Facebook Messenger. The application has exploited a flaw in the privacy of social networks that automatically shares the locations of all the users who write messages through his chat.
Before the expected start of the stage to Facebook – return Boston.com – Aran had posted on his blog that the application, within a few hours, has become viral and has been downloaded by 85 thousand users. Obviously, the response of the social network is not long in coming. The next day, the Aran has been contacted by Facebook that asked him to turn off the app and not to talk to the press.
Three days after publication, and two hours before he started his internship, Aran has received a call from an employee of Facebook who informed him that the company had terminated his contract internship for failing to meet “the high ethical standards expected by the interns.”
“This tool mapping has used Facebook data and breached our conditions that protect the privacy and security of the people – said Matt Steinfeld, Facebook spokesman – Despite being asked several times to remove the code, the creator of this tool not did. This is wrong and is inconsistent with the way of thinking of our community. “
About a week later, Facebook has released an update to Messenger emphasizing, in a press release, that the user had full control over how and when to share your location information. The description, however, as reported by Boston.com, made no mention of the previous defaults and did not specify that if they had not downloaded the update, users would continue to share their default positions, unless they had changed their privacy settings.
“It’s not the kind of thing that you can plan a week – said Steinfeld – Although here we move very quickly, we were working on this update for a couple of months” .
Khanna, for his part, said he just wanted to advise users how, inadvertently, you can share data that does not really want to reveal. “I wanted to make myself useful, I designed the application for the public good” has justified the guy who, however, had a very good summer: she accepted another internship in a start-up in Silicon Valley and, apart from training, He said that what happened to Facebook has taught him a lot. On the other hand he had done nothing but take literally the teaching of Zuckerberg, who said that one of the five core values of Facebook employees is “be bold.” So bold, but not too much.
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