Is it possible to be too smart for your own good? I suppose so, but you can be sure that Harvard student Aran Khanna was not trying to be a smart aleck when he managed to point out privacy flaws in Facebook, resulting in him having his Facebook internship withdrawn. It does sound pretty petty and immature on the social network giant’s side, don’t you think so? Let us dive into the details after the jump.
Harvard student Aran Khanna came up with a browser application three months ago, calling it Marauder’s Map (paying homage to the Harry Potter series). This Chrome extension relied on data from Facebook Messenger to figure out where users were whenever messages were sent, pointing out a location that was accurate to within 3 feet, which theoretically speaking, would be able to let total strangers see where the other people are within a chat group. Creepy stuff, this.
Apparently, this is a flaw that Facebook is aware of – and for approximately 3 years, to boot! Three days after Khanna shared about this online (which went viral, of course), Facebook requested Khanna to ensure the app is disabled – not to mention Facebook did away with location sharing from desktops, making sure that Khanna’s app remained impotent even if it was not disabled.
The sour icing on the cake was, Facebook even withdrew its internship offer from Khanna. All this even after Khanna complied with Facebook’s wishes to disable his app, as Khanna was informed that he had violated the Facebook user agreement earlier on when he scraped the social network for data.