While the rest of India is celebrating Independence Day tomorrow, most of us fail to realize that we have fallen prey to foreign corporate companies. Though we have gained freedom, it is just an illusion, as the superpowers still dominate the world.
One such story is that of Aran Khanna. If you had known about the Marauder’s Map, then this might interest you. Marauder’s Map was an application that was used to track location details of your Facebook friends, or anyone in the thread, through Facebook Messenger.
Aran Khanna created this application, and once he released it, it hit over 85,000 views. Marauder’s Map was basically a browser plugin, but people loved it, and it was even featured in big Media Publications like The Guardian and The Huffington Post. But Facebook did not like the app.
That was because of the fact that the Messenger app’s secrets were leaked. Facebook says that it protects the privacy of its users, but Khanna exposed the harsh reality of it, proving that the Facebook Messenger stores our location details by default. One week after this incident, Facebook updated the Messenger app and said that it was planning to do this for a long time.
According to Facebook, Khanna used the code in a different way, that was beyond the company’s ethical standards. Because of this, he got his internship cancelled. But that does not really make any sense. Khanna’s blog post also went viral, and Facebook said that his blog post was the reason for the company’s damage.
But whatever may be the reason, the harsh truth is that Facebook had tracked our location all this time with the help of Messenger, even if you had turned your location ‘off’. What do you say for this, Facebook?
In spite of being exposed, Facebook has only defended itself, and it has not agreed on the exposure of delicate user data. While you get on the internet, you really cannot expect privacy these days. But when a company says that it repects its user’s privacy, it has to.
More than a billion people are using Facebook today, and Khanna made us understand that the privacy of these people were at stake. Though he did not do it directly, many tech experts learnt it from the app, thanks to Khanna.
Khanna was aksed to discontinue his internship at Facebook, and also deactivate his application. He did as he was told, and Facebook fired him even though he did it. The story could have been different if the person who did this was an American. Facebook could not have fired him, or he would have filed a lawsuit against the company.
Khanna was also asked not to reveal any information to the press. He stills remains true to it, and he does not give much details about his application. Though Indian born employees are given good positions in corportate companies, the harsh truth is that corporate racism exists.
When the same American is paid $10,000 a month to work in India, an Indian is paid only 30,000 rupees. The government has no strict rules to save Indian employees like other countries do. It is not enough if we are independent, we have to fight for equality too.
The post Why Facebook Fired an Indian Origin Intern appeared first on KenFolios.