Aran Khanna, a senior student at Harvard University and former Facebook intern, launched an app in May that violated the privacy of the social network giant's users.
But according to the student, his Marauder Map app, which is a tribute to the "Harry Potter" novels, was meant to inform Facebook about the flaw in its privacy settings.
Boston.com reported that Khanna's app was a Chrome extension that collects data from the Messenger feature of Facebook. It uses the information to track down and show the locations of users every time they send messages through the social networking site.
Khanna, who made the app inside his dorm room just like how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, shared the Marauder Map through Reddit and Medium. Within days after its launch, the app received over 85,000 downloads.
Facebook immediately told Khanna to take down the app. Then, he received a message from the social media company informing that he was no longer part of its internship program.
Matt Steinfeld, a representative from the company explained that Khanna was dropped because he violated the agreement terms of Facebook, which are meant to protect the privacy of its users, according to NDTV.
However, a week later, the company launched an update for its Messenger app that offers users complete control over its location-sharing feature.
According to Steinfeld, despite the technical similarities, Facebook's update is not based on the Marauder Map. He noted that the company's developers have been working on it even before the Harvard student launched his program.
"This isn't the sort of thing that can happen in a week," the spokesperson told Boston.com. "Even though we move very fast here, they'd been working on it for months.
Khanna detailed his experience in a case study published on Aug. 11 for the Harvard Journal of Technology Science.
The former Facebook intern said he learned a lot from his experience and maintained that he developed the Marauder Map to warn users about how their private information can be easily exploited.
"I used data that was already there and just displayed it in a different way," he told USA Today. "I think that highlighting a privacy issue with the intent of showing people how much they are putting out there is a service to others.
