14 DAY TRIAL // Remember the Marauders Map Chrome extension that plotted on a map where your friends were when they talked to you? Remember how its developer was supposed to go on a Facebook internship? Well, not anymore, he's not.
As Aran Khanna explains in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science, after creating and publishing the extension, he had his Facebook internship rescinded.
If you haven't been keeping up with the story, here's a short history of all the events.
At the end of May, Mr. Khanna, a Harvard student who was supposed to go on a summer internship at Facebook, created a tiny Google Chrome extension that extracted geolocation data from Facebook private messages and plotted the location of the sender on a map.
The extension used geolocation data that the Facebook IM client shared by default for all users and became a viral hit in less than two days.
The extension worked only for three days
As we expected in our original story, Mr. Khanna was eventually contacted by a Facebook employee (his internship manager) and asked to take down the extension, which he did by disabling the mapping feature.
Mr. Khanna was also asked not to talk to the press, a rule that he followed.
Unfortunately for him, things didn't go as well as he hoped, as three days after publishing the extension, just hours before he was supposed to leave for his internship, he was contacted again and was told that the social network revoked his internship because he broke the site's user agreement by scraping Facebook for user data when he created the extension.
Later he also received an email from Facebook's head of global human resources and recruiting, containing another explanation for the revocation of his internship.
The language used in a Medium blog post upset the company's HR staff
Because Mr. Khanna also wrote a Medium post in which he explained the whole process involved in building the extension, and because he also updated the post making it clear the extension was taken down at Facebook's request, he wasn't up to par with the "high ethical standards around user privacy expected of interns."
While Mr. Khanna eventually found another internship, some good news ultimately comes out of the whole Marauders Map fiasco.
On the same day that Mr. Khanna was informed he was not welcomed anymore at Facebook, the company disabled the display of geolocation data in Web browsers (making any similar extensions useless), and followed up on June 4 with an update that changed the default geolocation feature from "share" to "not share" on all mobile devices.
While Facebook is paying hackers large sums of money for any security vulnerabilities they find, the same is not true for privacy-related issues.
Just yesterday, we reported on a similar incident with a UK-based developer, who exposed a method of harvesting user data via the company's API, findings that were ignored and taken seriously only after The Guardian ran a story on the topic.
