Harvard student allegedly stripped of Facebook internship for pointing out company's problems with privacy

Two different Harvard students launched bold, innovative applications from their dorm rooms, but while one, Mark Zuckerberg, invented Facebook, the other, Aran Khanna, just lost his internship with the social media giant.

Khanna had landed a Facebook internship and, in prepping for work, launched a Harry Potter-influenced Chrome extension called Marauder's Map, to help users understand Facebook's use of their location data, Boston reports. Marauder's Map took users' readily available data straight from Facebook's Messenger app to make a map of where friends were located when they were chatting — and it was scarily accurate up to three feet. While Facebook had been aware of the privacy flaw for three years, they weren't happy when Marauder's Map exploded on Reddit and Medium, and quickly asked Khanna to take the extension down. Then they told Khanna they were withdrawing his internship.

While Facebook followed up the popularity of Marauder's Map with a press release claiming to allow users to regulate the location data they want to share, it notably didn't mention that it would continue to share users' locations by default unless they manually changed their settings. Khanna maintains he didn't build his app to be malicious — just to raise users' awareness of exactly what they were getting into.

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