Facebook Intern Fired for Exposing Data Breach

Remember the magical Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter books that reveal the whereabouts of characters as they roam classrooms and the halls of Hogwarts school? A student developer, Aran Khanna from Harvard University, has created a Chrome extension that works similar and also named it Marauder’s Map. The extension that allows you to watch every footstep of your Facebook friends by grabbing location data from Facebook Messenger and rapidly plotting your friends’ locations on a map. We all are aware that Facebook shares our location data with our friends, however, what we probably aren’t aware of the accuracy of that data and easiness of extracting that data from the messaging service.

However, Khanna was supposed to intern at the tech giant this summer. After releasing his app which used Facebooks public data and describing on his blog how to use this data, Facebook withdrew it's offer of employment.

Facebook told him that “the extension violated the Facebook user agreement by "scraping" the site”. According to Khanna, Facebook had issues with him for sharing the whole story stepwise on his blog and code describing how Facebook collected and shared users' geolocation data. He emphasized, “the main problem is that every time you open your phone and send a single message it is so easy to forget about your location data being attached to it. Furthermore, it seems so harmless to assign a location with a single message, but the problem is over time the information from these messages adds up”. The users never came to know the real meaning of ‘By Default’. His primary concern over writing the code was to make people aware and the importance of the degree of private data being open to the world. Lastly, being portrayed as the villain of the whole story, Facebook updated its privacy policy and fired him.

Credits:
http://thehackernews.com/2015/08/facebook-fired-intern.html