 |
| Aran Khanna who lost his internship offer from Facebook after he showed a privacy flaw in Facebook mobile messenger (Image Source: Linkedin) |
After Indian American Harvard student Aran Khanna built an app which showed a serious privacy flaw with Facebook mobile messenger application, Facebook terminated its offer of his internship with the company.
Aran Khanna's app, a google chrome extension called the 'Marauder’s Map', simply retrieved the latitude and longitudes of the location of those who sent messages using Facebook mobile messenger.
Writing in Medium, he says by using the app, you could pinpoint the location of the person sending the message to less than a meter.
By looking at a cluster of messages over a period of time, you could even track the schedule of a person with a certain degree of certainty.
The root cause that allowed this was that Facebook mobile messenger application setting gave out user location details by default.
After Aran Khanna tweeted about his application and posted it on Reddit on May 26, it went viral.
Boston.com reports that during the next two days, senior personnel from Facebook first asked Aran Khanna not to talk to the press and then just two hours before he was supposed to leave for his internship with the company, withdrew the offer.
This happened despite Aran Khanna's compliance with all directives from Facebook.
Aran Khanna's case has generated a lot of interest and debate with mainstream press as well as the social media.
Some Reddit users are comparing Aran Khanna with Brian Acton, the engineer whom Facebook refused to employ, but later, after he built WhatsApp, paid him $20 billion to acquire the application.
Publicinformation available shows that Aran Khanna may well be on his way to becoming an expert software developer, scientist and entrepreneur; he has already interned and worked at Silicon Valley startups as well as Microsoft.
An avid sportsman into rowing, Aran had also volunteered to teach english in rural China.
The video below shows Aran Khanna in his native Seattle, among his close friends and family during his graduation party.