Facebook cancels internship of student who exposed major privacy flaw

California

 Social netorking giant Facebook cancelled an Harvard student’s internship after he reportedly exposed a serious privacy flaw in the social networking site’s messenger service.

According to a local news website, the Indian-origin student, Aran Khanna developed an application called Marauder’s Map that used data from Facebook Messenger to tracking users' location when they sent messages.

He also posted about his app on social networking sites such as Reddit and Medium in May this year and it went viral.

When the app caught the attention of Facebook, Khanna was asked to disable it. However, Khanna said that by that time,  the extension was already downloaded more than 85,000 times and reportedly shared on more that 200 publications.

In the following week, Facebook released a messenger app update that enables control over sharing the information about their location.

The social media giant cancelled Khanna’s summer internship, because “he did not meet the high ethical standards expected from the interns”.

He has accepted another internship with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley and later mentioned this experience in his case study titled ‘Facebook’s Privacy Incident Response: A study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger’ in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science.