Excerpts: For Aran Khanna, landing a highly sought-after internship at Facebook didn’t quite turn out to be the experience he expected.


In fact, the computer science student at Harvard University didn’t even get the chance to start working for the social media giant before they turned him away after he exposed a privacy problem for Facebook users.


Khanna had demonstrated the flaw in a widely publicized browser application he created that allowed people to track their friends based on location data from Facebook’s Messenger app. He wrote a script that pulled geo-location information from Facebook — available to anyone using the Messenger app — and used it to develop a Chrome extension called “Marauder’s Map” (if you don’t get the joke, here’s some help).


The extension allowed people to see on a map exactly where their friends sent messages, accurate within three feet. For Khanna, the extension — published on his blog May 26 — was a chance to underscore the privacy implications of the “invasive” collection of geo-location data, something that has become ubiquitous in the digital world. READ MORE ->

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Did he expose their intentional "flaw"?

Linda Mihalic
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