Social Media giant kicks out intern for exposing location tracking system

Aran Khanna, a Harvard graduate, recently lost an internship with Facebook because he shone a light on the company’s widespread location tracking, Gizmodo reports.

He did this by releasing a Chrome extension called Marauder’s Map that would share the location of someone in a conversation in Messenger for Android.

The details were so specific it alarmed some people and apparently got Facebook to update the sharing settings for the app, and of course, drop Khanna from his upcoming internship.

The Social Network reportedly told the Mathematics graduate to take the app down and not to respond the media.

He apparently did this but it still told him he was no longer welcome there, although the company denied he had cooperated with its requests.

"This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety," a Facebook spokesman said.

"Despite being asked repeatedly to remove the code, the creator of this tool left it up. This is wrong and it’s inconsistent with how we think about serving our community."

He added the company had also ‘began developing improvements to location sharing months ago’ and the updates were not the result of his program.

To add to the confusion Khanna said Facebook told him the app he created wasn’t the problem and it was his blog that described Facebook’s data collection methods that was.