Social media behemoth Facebook cancelled an internship it earlier offered to Harvard student Aran Khanna, after an application that he created, “Marauder’s Map” was able to pull geo-location data from the Facebook Messenger programme to reveal within three feet the exact location of users of the app.
In May, the third-year Indian-American student was about to begin his internship programme when he created a Chrome browser extension that appeared to capitalise on a “privacy flaw that Facebook had been aware of for about three years,” according to reports, and this was the Messenger app’s automatic sharing of users’ locations with anyone who they messaged.
Mr. Khanna was said to have tweeted about the app on May 26 and posted about it on Reddit and elsewhere, after which it rapidly went viral with nearly 85,000 downloads until, three days later, when Facebook ordered Mr. Khanna to disable the app and also banned it from linking to the site.
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On May 29, scarcely two hours before he was supposed to begin his internship, Mr. Khanna received a call from Facebook saying that the company was “rescinding” his summer internship offer as he had apparently violated the Facebook user agreement when he pulled the location data from the website.
While Mr. Khanna published a case study in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science explaining the “potentially invasive usage” of the information shared by Facebook users, tantamount to serious privacy violations, Facebook promptly made a statement after Mr. Khanna’s app came out, saying that a recent update gave users “full control over when and how you share your location information.”
Facebook’s statement reportedly did not mention the previous default settings, “nor did it point out that users who didn’t activate the update would continue to share their locations by default unless they manually altered their privacy settings.”
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In comments to local news website Boston.com Facebook Spokesman Matt Steinfeld said that the company had been working on a Messenger update long before Mr. Khanna’s blog post was published, adding, “This isn’t the sort of thing that can happen in a week… Even though we move very fast here, they’d been working on it for a few months.”
However this incident does not represent the first case of privacy concerns linked to the social media website.
Even earlier this year, Facebook reportedly faced flak over its facial recognition software, which “automatically identifies individuals in a digital image by comparing facial features in the image and database, and allows computers to link a person's name to their face in photos or videos.”
After the latest incident many in mainstream and social media also commented on the irony that Facebook founder billionaire Mark Zuckerberg had launched his product from the very same dorm rooms of Harvard that Mr. Khanna created his app in.