Friday, August 14, 2015

Student Loses Facebook Internship After Pointing Out Privacy Flaws

Allison Pohle:

Khanna, who detailed the experience in a case study published Tuesday in Technology Science, a journal published by Harvard University, told Boston.com he created the app to show the consequences of unintentionally sharing data. That way, he said, users could decide for themselves whether or not it was a violation of their privacy.

[…]

Three days after the extension was posted, and two hours before he was supposed to leave to start his internship, Khanna received a call from a Facebook employee telling him that the company was rescinding his summer internship offer. Khanna said he was told that he violated the Facebook user agreement when he scraped the site for data.

However, Khanna told Boston.com that the data was from his own messages, which meant he used information accessible to all Facebook users, not just to employees.

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The funniest part: “This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety”

So, the user agreement terms protect people's safety..., they can benefit greatly by cross-pollinating ideas from Oracle -- don't reverse engineer their stuff you security will be just fine.

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