Harvard Student Loses Internship Over Location-Tracking Extension

The Harvard student who created a Chrome extension that could track the location of Facebook friends on a map said he lost an internship at the social-networking site over the project.

"Facebook phoned me to inform me that it was rescinding the offer of a summer internship, citing as a reason that the extension violated the Facebook user agreement by 'scraping' the site," Aran Khanna wrote in a summary of his Marauder's Map exploit.

Khanna's "Marauder's Map," named in a nod to Harry Potter's magical chart, was an extension that pulled location data from Facebook Messenger and put it on a map. Khanna admitted that the extension was "creepy," but said it was intended to highlight the fact that geo-location data was shared by default on Android.

Khanna later said he deactivated the official version of the extension, while Facebook deactivated location sharing from the desktop. "However, it seems locations are still being shared on the mobile app and sharing is still enabled by default," he said in May.

According to Khanna's project summary, he was supposed to start a summer internship at Facebook on June 1. When his Medium post about Marauder's Map went up in late May, Facebook contacted him right away and instructed him not to talk to the press, Khanna said. Three days later, they rescinded the internship offer.

"The head of global human resources and recruiting followed up with an email message stating that my blog post did not reflect the 'high ethical standards' around user privacy expected of interns," Khanna said. "According to the email, the privacy issue was not with Facebook Messenger, but rather with my blog post and code describing how Facebook collected and shared users' geo-location data."

Facebook released a Messenger update on June 4 with opt-in location sharing. But, according to Khanna, "as of June 2015, shared geo-location data from before the update remains viewable on the mobile application, and users who did not update to the new versions of the Messenger app on iOS and Android still share geo-locations in the same manner as before."

In a statement provided to PCMag, Facebook said it does not discuss specific personnel issues. But Khanna's conclusion about the Messenger app "is revisionist history that conveniently omits a few important points."

"First, we began developing improvements to location sharing months ago, based on input from people who use Messenger," Facebook said. "Second, this mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people's privacy and safety. Despite being asked repeatedly to remove the code, the creator of this tool left it up. This is wrong and it's inconsistent with how we think about serving our community."

"We don't dismiss employees for exposing privacy flaws, but we do take it seriously when someone misuses user data and puts people at risk," the company concluded.