America
Facebook cancels Indian student's internship
Washington, Aug 13
Facebook cancelled an
Indian-origin student's internship after he exposed a serious privacy
flaw in the social media giant's messenger service, a media report said.
Aran
Khanna's application, Marauder's Map, used data from Facebook Messenger
to map users' location when they sent messages, Boston.com reported on
Wednesday.
The computer science and math student at Harvard
University in Massachusetts, US, posted about his app on social media
sites Reddit and Medium in May this year and soon it went viral.
The app caught the attention of Facebook and Khanna was asked to disable it.
However,
before it was disabled, the extension was downloaded more than 85,000
times and "shared on over 200 publications", according to Khanna.
About
a week later, Facebook released a Messenger app update to provide users
"full control over when and how you share your location information".
Facebook cancelled Khanna's summer internship, saying he did not meet the high ethical standards expected from the interns.
The
student accepted another internship with a tech start-up in Silicon
Valley and later detailed the experience in a case study titled
'Facebook's Privacy Incident Response: A study of geolocation sharing on
Facebook Messenger' in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science.