Facebook cancelled an internship offer to a Harvard student over launching a controversial Chrome extension that can spot location down to the nearest meter of Facebook friends.
‘Marauder’s Map’ was named after a magical location-tracking map in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books that can highlight where your friends were, provided those friends also used Messenger on their phones. At that point, Messenger automatically shared users’ locations with anyone they messaged, Mashable reported.
For the few days in May when it worked, Marauder’s Map was a Facebook stalker’s dream. When I used it, I could track a friend who was in Palo Alto for meetings down to the exact building.
Aran Khanna told Boston.com that Facebook withdrew its summer internship offer three days after Marauder’s Map launched — because he violated the Facebook user agreement when he scraped the site for data, and also offered an unofficial workaround to use Marauder’s Map.
Khanna also said that Facebook’s head of global human resources and recruiting dinged him because his accompanying Medium post described the way Facebook collected and shared user data — an approach that seemed to violate the social network’s “high ethical standards” for interns.
“I decided to write this extension because we are constantly being told how we are losing privacy with the increasing digitization of our lives,” Khanna wrote in the post. “However, the consequences never seem tangible … with this code you can see for yourself the potentially invasive usage of the information you share, and decide for yourself if this is something you should worry about.”
A week later, Facebook rolled out a location-based update to Messenger. The update removed the always-on location-sharing feature that enabled the Marauder’s Map’s stalking abilities.
Image Courtesy: Mashable.com
