A reputation that wants Facebook apps and Facebook Messenger to drain the battery on the mobile devices they are installed on, confirmed by former Facebook employee George Hayward.
Data scientist George Hayward reports that Facebook may be secretly draining the battery on its users' mobile phones on purpose. As he mentions the New York Post, there's actually a name for what Facebook does, it's called a "negative test". testing) and allows tech companies to secretly drain the batteries on someone's phone to test various features in an app.
Hayward was fired from Meta for refusing to participate in negative testing.
"I said to the manager, 'This might hurt someone,' and she said that by hurting some people, we can help more people. Any data scientist worth his salt knows that we don't mess with people," he told the Post. .
Hayward was fired from Meta in November and initially filed a lawsuit against the company in Manhattan Federal Court.
The 33-year-old worked for Meta's Facebook Messenger app, which provides messages text, phone and video calls between users. In the lawsuit, Hayward's attorney, Dan Kaiser, said draining users' smartphone batteries puts people at risk, especially "in situations where they need to communicate with others, such as the police or an emergency crew." .
But the lawsuit had to be withdrawn because the terms of Meta's employment forced Hayward to take his case to arbitration. Kaiser said most people have no idea that Facebook and other social networking companies can intentionally drain the battery. Commenting on the practice of negative tests, the lawyer added, “It is clearly illegal. It's infuriating that on my phone, the battery can be tampered with by anyone.”
Hayward was originally hired in 2019, with a six-figure annual salary from Meta. But when he saw the company's request to carry out the negative test, he said: "I refused to do this test. It turns out that if you tell your boss, 'No, that's illegal,' it doesn't go over very well."
At some point during his employment at Meta, the company handed Hayward an internal training document titled "How to Carefully Run Negative Tests." The document included examples of how to perform such tests. After reading the document, Hayward said it appeared to him that Facebook had used negative tests in the past and added:
"I have never seen a more horrible document in my career."
