Facebook Cancelled His Internship When He Exposed A Major Safety Flaw In Their System

Internship in Facebook would be like a dream come true for most of us. Imagine how cool it would be to say it when someone asks what do you do, “I work at Facebook.” No need to explain who they are or what do they do. People already envy you for being at one of the coolest places to work.

However, this uber cool organization showed its true corporate colors in a recent case.
Aran Khanna, a student at Harvard was proud of himself for scoring the coveted Facebook internship. Three months before he had to join Facebook for the internship, he created an application called ‘Marauder’s Map’ (all Harry Potter fans will get it). This application would connect to your Facebook messenger and show the location of people from where they have messaged you.

This pointed out a major privacy flaw with Facebook’s extension. The user tweeted about this application on May 26th and within three days it got numerous downloads. Soon, Facebook contacted Aran and asked him to take down the application. Very soon the location extension was disabled from the desktop which meant Aran’s application would not work even if it was not taken down.

Aran’s internship at Facebook was soon cancelled and he was blamed for violating the privacy and safety of people by creating and misusing the tool. However, the big picture that lies ahead of the issue is that, shouldn’t Facebook be thanking him for pointing out the major privacy flaw that they had?

He had informed Facebook team about it before launching the application and his motive behind it was to point it to the team that there can be other people out there who would use this privacy flaw to their own benefit.

Facebook could have taken him on board and along with him they could have worked to remove the bug instead of calling his application malicious. Maybe Facebook becoming a total corporate organization is not such a good thing after all.

News Source: NDTV

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