Facebook secretly drains power from its users’ cell phone batteries. The information comes from the prosecution of a lawsuit filed in Manhattan Federal Court by a former employee of the social network. The procedure is known as “negative testing” and allows for remote testing.
According to plaintiff, data scientist George Hayward, these field tests, supposedly carried out without the knowledge of the usersIt allows tech companies to “sneak” evaluate certain issues, such as application execution speed or image load time.
The employee would say to his manager, “This could hurt someone,” and received the explanation that “by hurting a few, we can help the masses.” Hayward, 33, was working on Facebook’s Messenger app and was fired last November for allegedly refusing to run such tests.
How does the employee know that Facebook is sucking the batteries?
Hayward was hired for a temp job in October 2019 for a six-figure salary and said he only became aware of the illegal practice when he bought an in-house training booklet called. “How to Do Weighted Negative Tests”. The guide brought practical examples of such experiments carried out.
In the opening claims of the case, the data scientist warns: Killing a person’s cell phone battery is the same as putting them at risk.mainly “in situations where it is necessary to communicate with others, including but not limited to the police or other rescuers”.
talk to new york postHayward’s attorney, Dan Kaiser, recalled that most people probably have no idea what social media companies are doing behind the scenes. According to him, the process was removed from the list of cases as his client would have to go to the arbitration room first.
Source: Tec Mundo
