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Reportedly, a Harvard University student lost his internship at the company after he ran a browser app from his dorm room that exploited privacy vulnerabilities on Facebook’s mobile messenger.
The student’s app, dubbed Marauder’s Map, showed that users of Facebook Messenger could pinpoint the exact locations of people they were chatting with. He explained that he revealed the vulnerability in order to show the consequences of unintentionally sharing information and thought he was doing a public service. The student claims he never intended the app to be malicious.
However, the program was launched from his dorm room a few months ago, and 85,000 people downloaded it. If you remember, Mark Zuckerberg launched “the Facebook” from a Harvard dorm room eleven years ago. In a few days, Facebook asked the student to remove the app from the store and disable it. In its turn, the company released a Messenger app update that fixed the bug. Facebook claimed that it was aware of the flaw and had been working on a Messenger update months before the student launched his app.
The most interesting part is that 2 hours before the student was supposed to leave to start his internship at Facebook, he received a call from a Facebook representative to inform him that Facebook decided to rescind the offer because the student had violated the company’s user agreement when he scraped the website for data.
The student wrote about the experience in a case study, which was recently published for the Harvard Journal of Technology Science. Instead of Facebook, he spent the summer interning at a Silicon Valley startup and claimed that the back-and-forth with the social networking giant ended up being a learning experience as well.
The student’s app, dubbed Marauder’s Map, showed that users of Facebook Messenger could pinpoint the exact locations of people they were chatting with. He explained that he revealed the vulnerability in order to show the consequences of unintentionally sharing information and thought he was doing a public service. The student claims he never intended the app to be malicious.
However, the program was launched from his dorm room a few months ago, and 85,000 people downloaded it. If you remember, Mark Zuckerberg launched “the Facebook” from a Harvard dorm room eleven years ago. In a few days, Facebook asked the student to remove the app from the store and disable it. In its turn, the company released a Messenger app update that fixed the bug. Facebook claimed that it was aware of the flaw and had been working on a Messenger update months before the student launched his app.
The most interesting part is that 2 hours before the student was supposed to leave to start his internship at Facebook, he received a call from a Facebook representative to inform him that Facebook decided to rescind the offer because the student had violated the company’s user agreement when he scraped the website for data.
The student wrote about the experience in a case study, which was recently published for the Harvard Journal of Technology Science. Instead of Facebook, he spent the summer interning at a Silicon Valley startup and claimed that the back-and-forth with the social networking giant ended up being a learning experience as well.