Facebook cancelled a student's internship after he highlighted a massive privacy issue

Facebook cancelled a Harvard student's internship after he created a Google Chrome plugin that highlighted serious privacy flaws in the social network's messaging service, Boston.com reports.

In May, computer science and mathematics student Aran Khanna built Marauder's Map. It was a browser plugin that made use of the fact that people who use the Facebook Messenger share their location with everyone they message with by default.

Upon installing the plugin, users could use it to precisely track the movements of anyone they were in a conversation thread with. This included users who they were not friends with on Facebook - and was accurate to within a meter.

The app went viral, was downloaded 85,000 times, and saw widespread press coverage by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. Three days after he launched it via a Medium post, Khanna disabled the plugin after Facebook told him to. At the social network's request, he refused to speak to press, and the company released a new version of Messenger a week later, changing how users share their locations.

Earlier this week, Khanna published a case study for the Harvard Journal of Technology Science about his experience. Here's the student on Facebook's initial response:

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