{"id":38390,"date":"2023-02-06T16:50:29","date_gmt":"2023-02-06T21:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=38390"},"modified":"2023-02-14T15:30:47","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T20:30:47","slug":"facebook-negative-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/02\/06\/facebook-negative-testing\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Negative Testing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kathianne Boniello<\/a> (via Jamie Zawinski<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

Facebook can secretly drain its users’ cellphone batteries, a former employee contends in a lawsuit.<\/p>\n

The practice, known as “negative testing,” allows tech companies to “surreptitiously” run down someone’s mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image might load, according to data scientist George Hayward.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He refused to do that and was fired.<\/p>\n\n

Cory Doctorow<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Hayward balked because he knew that among the 1.3 billion people who use Messenger, some would be placed in harm’s way if Facebook deliberately drained their batteries – physically stranded, unable to communicate with loved ones experiencing emergencies, or locked out of their identification, payment method, and all the other functions filled by mobile phones.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

We don’t know much else, because Hayward’s employment contract included a non-negotiable binding arbitration waiver, which means that he surrendered his right to seek legal redress from his former employer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2023-02-14): Tracy Lopez<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Testing within an app is aimed at improving it, but this was not the case with Facebook apps, both on iOS and Android: the company it slowed down the loading of the images, the connections to the pages of the links and even made the application consume more battery.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Meta carried out negative tests for draw a relationship between app performance and app experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This seems to be clearly in violation of App Store guideline<\/a> 2.4.2. Though, according to the NTIA<\/a>, Apple claims it “reviews each line of an app’s code,” we know they don’t do that in any real sense and likely didn’t realize Facebook was doing this.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kathianne Boniello (via Jamie Zawinski): Facebook can secretly drain its users’ cellphone batteries, a former employee contends in a lawsuit. The practice, known as “negative testing,” allows tech companies to “surreptitiously” run down someone’s mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2023-02-06T21:50:31Z","apple_news_api_id":"29d6d7ea-59ab-4369-8dd3-783692091a6b","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2023-02-14T20:30:49Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AKdbX6lmrQ2mN03g2kgkaaw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[248,249,28,25,1162,1240,31,26,41,209],"class_list":["post-38390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-android","tag-androidapp","tag-batterylife","tag-facebook","tag-facebook-messenger","tag-firing","tag-ios","tag-iosapp","tag-lawsuit","tag-legal"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38390"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38460,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38390\/revisions\/38460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}