Friday, April 10, 2026
ADVT 
International

Indian American Harvard Student Loses Facebook Internship

IANS, 13 Aug, 2015 02:14 PM
    Facebook cancelled an Indian-origin student's internship after he exposed a serious privacy flaw in the social media giant's messenger service, a media report said.
     
    Aran Khanna's application, Marauder's Map, used data from Facebook Messenger to map users' location when they sent messages, Boston.com reported on Wednesday.
     
    The computer science and math student at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US, posted about his app on social media sites Reddit and Medium in May this year and soon it went viral.
     
    The app caught the attention of Facebook and Mr Khanna was asked to disable it.
     
    However, before it was disabled, the extension was downloaded more than 85,000 times and "shared on over 200 publications", according to Mr Khanna.
     
    About a week later, Facebook released a Messenger app update to provide users "full control over when and how you share your location information".
     
    Facebook cancelled Mr Khanna's summer internship, saying he did not meet the high ethical standards expected from the interns.
     
    The student accepted another internship with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley and later detailed the experience in a case study titled 'Facebook's Privacy Incident Response: A study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger' in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science

    MORE International ARTICLES

    Death of Indian-American couple ruled suicide, murder

    Death of Indian-American couple ruled suicide, murder
    The mysterious death of an Indian-American couple has been ruled as a suicide and a murder a month after the couple were found dead in their Texas...

    Death of Indian-American couple ruled suicide, murder

    Hong Kong protests stood out for peace and art

    Hong Kong protests stood out for peace and art
    The recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong attracted global attention not only for their remarkably peaceful nature and the friendly spirit of its...

    Hong Kong protests stood out for peace and art

    US apex court temporarily halts gay marriages in Idaho

    US apex court temporarily halts gay marriages in Idaho
    The US Supreme Court has temporarily halted same-sex marriages in Idaho, a day after a federal appellate court revoked the prohibition in the states...

    US apex court temporarily halts gay marriages in Idaho

    MH17 victim found wearing oxygen mask: Dutch minister

    MH17 victim found wearing oxygen mask: Dutch minister
    Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans has said that one of the passengers on the crashed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 had an oxygen....

    MH17 victim found wearing oxygen mask: Dutch minister

    Imran Khan asks Sharif to speak up against border firing

    Imran Khan asks Sharif to speak up against border firing
     Pakistani cricketer turned politician Imran Khan has asked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif why he is not speaking up against Indian "aggression" along the frontier...

    Imran Khan asks Sharif to speak up against border firing

    WHO: Spain's Ebola case won't be last in Europe

    WHO: Spain's Ebola case won't be last in Europe
    MADRID - A Spanish nursing assistant may be the first person in the ongoing epidemic to catch Ebola outside of Africa, but she probably won't be the last, experts warn.

    WHO: Spain's Ebola case won't be last in Europe