Three months ago, Harvard student Aran Khanna was preparing to start a coveted internship at Facebook when he launched a browser application from his dorm room that angered the social media behemoth. 
 
 His application, called Marauder’s Map — a clever name that Harry Potter fans will appreciate — was a Chrome extension that used data from Facebook Messenger to map where users were when they sent messages. The app also showed the locations, which were accurate to within three feet, in a group chat with people he barely knew. That meant complete strangers could hypothetically see that he had messaged them from a Starbucks around the corner, while he could see that they had messaged from their dorms. 
 
 The app capitalized on a privacy flaw that Facebook had been aware of for about three years: the Facebook Messenger app automatically shared users’ locations with anyone who they messaged. 
 
 Advertisement - Continue Reading Below 
 
 Khanna tweeted about the app on May 26 and posted about it on Reddit and Medium. Marauder’s Map began to go viral. Facebook, never one to miss a trend, quickly caught on. 
 
 Within three days, Facebook asked Khanna to disable the app. The company also deactivated location sharing from desktops, which meant Khanna’s app wouldn’t work even if he hadn’t taken it down. And the company that Mark Zuckerberg famously launched from his Harvard dorm room withdrew its internship offer from this Harvard student, who apparently made the mistake of...launching an app from his dorm room. 
 
 Before it was disabled, the extension was downloaded more than 85,000 times, Khanna said. 
 
 About a week later, Facebook released a Messenger app update trumpeted as follows in a news release: “With this update, you have full control over when and how you share your location information.” 
 
 The description didn’t mention the previous default settings. Nor did it point out that users who didn’t activate the update would continue to share their locations by default unless they manually altered their privacy settings. 
 
 Matt Steinfeld, a Facebook spokesman, said the company had been working on a Messenger update long before Khanna’s blog post was published. 
 
 “This isn’t the sort of thing that can happen in a week,” Steinfeld told Boston.com. “Even though we move very fast here, they’d been working on it for a few months.” 
 
 Khanna, who detailed the experience in a case study published Tuesday in Technology Science, a journal published by Harvard University, told Boston.com he created the app to show the consequences of unintentionally sharing data. That way, he said, users could decide for themselves whether or not it was a violation of their privacy. 
 
 Facebook Messenger, the company’s mobile messaging app, had been set up with automatic geolocation sharing since it launched in 2011. CNET drew attention to the issue in 2012 and showed users how to switch off location services. Various updates to the app improved its usability and even introduced fun cat emoji stickers, but the geolocation sharing remained. 
 
 Khanna used Messenger frequently when he started studying at Harvard, but didn’t realize how much information he was unintentionally sharing until he began to look at his message history. 
 
 The day after Marauder’s Map was posted, Khanna said his future manager at Facebook called him and asked him not to talk to the press. That evening, Khanna received a call from Facebook’s global communications lead for privacy and public policy, who reiterated that Khanna shouldn’t talk to the press because the story had become damaging. 
 
 Khanna complied, redirecting all press inquiries back to Facebook. 
 
 The next day, Facebook asked him to deactivate the extension. He did, but also updated his Medium post and the extension’s description to make it clear that Facebook asked him to disable the map. 
 
 Three days after the extension was posted, and two hours before he was supposed to leave to start his internship, Khanna received a call from a Facebook employee telling him that the company was rescinding his summer internship offer. Khanna said he was told that he violated the Facebook user agreement when he scraped the site for data. 
 
 However, Khanna told Boston.com that the data was from his own messages, which meant he used information accessible to all Facebook users, not just to employees. 
 
 Khanna then received an email from Facebook’s head of global human resources and recruiting, who told him that his Medium post didn’t meet the high ethical standards expected of interns. Khanna was told that the issue wasn’t the Messenger app itself, but instead the way his blog described how Facebook collected and shared user data. 
 
 “This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms, and those terms exist to protect people’s privacy and safety,” Steinfeld told Boston.com. “Despite being asked repeatedly to remove the code, the creator of this tool left it up. This is wrong and it’s inconsistent with how we think about serving our community.” 
 
 In his first letter to investors back in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook follows an approach they coined the “Hacker Way.” 
 
 “The word ‘hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” he wrote. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.” 
 
 Khanna thought his extension — which he built quickly and which tested boundaries — was performing a public good by showing users how their data was being used. 
 
 “I didn’t write the program to be malicious,” he said. 
 
 In the end, Khanna had a pretty great summer after all. He accepted another internship with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley. And, he said, the back-and-forth with Facebook turned out to be an “internship experience” in itself that taught him a great deal. 
 
 In the closing of his letter to investors, Zuckerberg said one of the five core values of Facebook is for its employees to “be bold.” 
 
 But not too bold. 
 
 Famous Massachusetts companies ||||| Facebook's Privacy Incident Response: a study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger Aran Khanna Abstract 
 
 Introduction 
 
 Background 
 
 Methods 
 
 Results 
 
 Discussion 
 
 References 
 
 
 
 Download 
 
 Authors 
 
 Citation 
 
 Data 
 
 
 
 Suggestions News coverage by day In 2012, a media outlet reported that Facebook Messenger shared personal geolocations by default 
 
 In 2015, my demonstration displayed Facebook's shared data on a map; it was downloaded over 85,000 times 
 
 After 9 days of news coverage, Facebook released an update that requires a user's permission to share geolocations Abstract Facebook allows users to chat among themselves on a mobile app called Facebook Messenger. From 2011 to the start of this study in May 2015, Facebook Messenger collected and shared user geo-locations as the default setting for every message sent from the Android mobile app. These locations were visible to anyone in a group chat, regardless of his or her relationship to the sender on the Facebook social network. Noticing a lack of significant public response to the visible nature of geo-location data on Facebook Messenger, despite media coverage dating back to 2012, I hypothesized that users were either (1) not aware, or (2) not concerned about the collection and visibility of their geo-location data on the app. This study explored this hypothesis by testing how the public responded to easily seeing the historical geo-location data collected and shared by Facebook Messenger. This study also tested the response from Facebook, a company with a reputation for encouraging outside-the-box "hacking". I wrote a browser application that requires a Facebook user to log into their Facebook account and then displays on a map the geo-location data shared with that user through Facebook Messenger chats. I announced the tool in a blog post and publicized it on Twitter and a few other online forums. The immediate public response was that of surprise and concern over the privacy issue raised by the collection and visibility of the geo-location data. Results summary: My tool has been downloaded over 85,000 times since its release, and more than 170 global news publications linked to my post. During the first three days after release of the geo-location mapping tool, Facebook also responded by demanding that I take down the tool, which I did. Nine days after the release, Facebook made sharing geo-location data an opt-in feature, allowing users to select to share personal geolocations in Facebook Messenger, although all historical geo-location data is still archived and shared. The results of the study suggest sufficient public attention may be necessary for redress of reported privacy concerns. Introduction Hundreds of millions of people share personal information on Facebook. Starting in 2011, Facebook implemented initiatives focused on "frictionless sharing" to automatically post a user's activity on music apps, such as Spotify, or news readers, such as The Washington Post, that use Facebook's Open Graph to integrate their websites more closely with Facebook. [1] This automatic posting of songs listened to and articles read was not very popular with users, and Facebook announced in May 2014 that it would decrease the visibility of passively shared user activities on their friends' news feeds. [2, 3, 4] Regulators have also expressed privacy concerns with regard to how Facebook handles sharing of user data. For example, in Europe, the Belgian Privacy Commission found that Facebook "fails to offer adequate control mechanisms" for the use of user data. Furthermore, "Facebook places too much burden on its users, [who are] expected to navigate Facebook's complex web of settings in search of possible opt-outs." Finally the commission stated that, "Facebook's default settings related to behavioral profiling … are particularly problematic." [5, 6] Background In 2011 Facebook launched Facebook Messenger, an application (or "app") for Android and iOS mobile devices. Messenger has the ability to share geo-location with messages. [7] When a Facebook user sends a message from a smartphone using Messenger, the user's physical location can also be sent. Prior to a June 2015 update, unless a user changed the initial default settings of the program, the app would collect and display geo-location information with message content by default in all conversations on the Android app, including conversations in chat groups with people who are not direct friends on Facebook's social network. When the app first installs on a mobile device, a notice appears that informs the user that the app will collect and share geo-location information. After that notice appears, the only other indicator of location data collection and sharing is a small blue icon next to the textbox in a conversation. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the Messenger app with this icon highlighted in Android. Figure 1. Image of Facebook Messenger's Android application showing a message sent by Roger. The small icon in the lower right, highlighted by a red box, is colored blue, showing that geo-location is being broadcast along with the message. Figure 2. The results of tapping a message with location attached on the Android app. Tapping on the message "*margo sry android autocorrct" reveals a map showing where the message originated. Figure 3. iOS app showing sender's location after the recipient clicks on a message with location attached. Other Facebook users can view shared geo-locations on the Facebook Messenger application by tapping on individual messages in their chat log, which reveals a map of the location where the individual was when the message was sent (Figure 2). On iOS, the application requests access to the device's geo-location data [9], and a similar interface for sharing location data in chats exists in the iOS Messenger app (Figure 3). On the desktop version of Messenger [10], geo-locations can be viewed by moving a mouse over a small pin attached to a message, to reveal a similar map (Figure 4). Figure 4. An image of a chat with Keyon from Facebook Messenger's desktop web application. The small pins next to the messages, highlighted by red boxes, show that geo-location is attached to these messages (and can be viewed by hovering the mouse over the pins). A user can disable geo-location sharing for individual conversations by pressing the blue icon in the app. A user can also disable geo-location sharing at any time for all messages by going into the application settings and finding the option to disable it. Adjusting privacy controls for location sharing on mobile operating systems is not entirely intuitive, as evidenced by the number of popular sites that have felt the need to publish guides on how to adjust geo-location controls. [11] Prior to the June 2015 Messenger update, location data sharing was on by default in Android. It required user permission to become perpetually active in the iOS Messenger app. [8] In 2012, CNET was the first major website to raise concerns about the privacy implications of Facebook Messenger's geo-location sharing feature. [12] A few other publications subsequently voiced concerns. [13, 14] Facebook did not take significant action to change the software in response to these concerns, and so the geo-location sharing continued to operate unchanged. There was not significant public pressure for change after the initial news coverage about Facebook's location sharing settings. This raises two questions: (1) whether Facebook users knew about the geo-location collection and sharing, and (2) whether they cared about its privacy implications. Facebook's location data practices presented an opportunity (1) to study how easy it is for a computer program to systematically copy the data and (2) to test whether Facebook's initial notification on app installation, along with the options to disable geo-location sharing within the Messenger app and through the Android and iOS system settings, were sufficient to satisfy the privacy concerns of users aware of the data sharing. My Interest in Facebook Messenger I became interested in this issue during the spring of 2015. At the time, I was a junior at Harvard College and had been offered a summer internship position at Facebook doing software development. I had secured the internship through Harvard's Office of Career Services' (OCS) On Campus Interview program. The internship was a paid position starting June 1, 2015, and I had signed a letter of intent to join the company, although I was not to be considered an employee until my June 1 start date, meaning that I was not privy to any proprietary information. I was attracted to work at Facebook by the popularity of its products and its publicly professed "hacker culture", where "code wins arguments." [15] Methods My approach was to build an extension for a common web browser so that a person running the extension could see the geo-locations of any Facebook user who is sending them (or a chat group they are in) messages through Facebook Messenger. I would then make the extension publicly available and alert the public through a blog post, Twitter and online forums. This approach made public what some may already be doing – harvesting geo-location information about Facebook users they have been in conversations with. It also provided transparency and feedback to users about their geo-location settings on Facebook. If there was no reaction by users or Facebook, then Facebook's current geo-location data practices were potentially sufficient to address privacy concerns. My expectation was that the historical pattern of lack of public pressure on this issue evidenced from 2012 through May 2015 would continue. The Extension The extension is a lightweight program (called a "script") that runs on Google's popular web browser, Chrome. After a user logs into a Facebook account, when the Facebook Messenger page appears on Chrome on a desktop computer, the script runs in the background. It detects calls to update the message page, requests a copy of the content and then plots the location data associated with the content onto a map that appears in the browser. This approach allows the extension to access all the geo-location data delivered to the browser. The precision of the location coordinates was accurate enough to locate a user to within a meter. It is important to note that all the data retrieved were accessible without the extension if a user clicked on the map icon for each message. The script did nothing illegal or malicious; rather, it accessed and displayed data already available to the user. Furthermore, the data aggregated on the map remained temporarily in memory and was discarded when the page reloaded. A full technical overview of the system can be seen in Figure 5. Using the extension, a user can choose to see a map of the geo-location data collected and shared by Facebook Messenger about the user and about others users in the same chat group. Figure 7 shows a demonstration of a map created with the extension. I uploaded the Chrome extension to the Chrome Web Store, marking it as unlisted so that only those with a specific link, which I shared on my blog, could access it. [16] The title of the extension on the Chrome Web Store was "Marauder's Map", which can be seen in Figure 6. I also archived an open source copy of the code for the extension in an MIT-licensed Github repository with the title "marauders-map". [17] This repository contained the code and setup instructions for creating the extension from source. Figure 5. A graphical depiction giving a full technical overview of the marauders-map Chrome extension. White boxes represent the components injected by the extension. The extension consists of a Chrome background script that copies asynchronous requests from the desktop Facebook Messenger page to the Facebook cloud endpoint for retrieving messages, and then passes the HTTP bodies of these requests to an injected content script running on the Facebook Messenger page. This content script then emulates the original asynchronous request (automatically adding the appropriate headers) and plots the location data returned by Facebook onto a map drawn using the Mapbox API. With this base code, the extension can collect data on all messages loaded onto the page asynchronously. However, owing to optimizations in how Facebook delivers data to the browser, some messages are sent embedded in the initial HTML packet (via a protocol known as BigPipe). Using a simple asynchronous GET request, the content script pulls this HTML packet and uses a regular expression to parse the embedded location data from the messages, then plots the data on the map. Figure 6. A screenshot of the extension download page in the Google Play store. Clicking the "Add to Chrome" button allowed users to automatically install the extension. The total number of users (88,924) the extension had acquired over its lifetime is visible next to the star rating in the top left Figure 7. A labeled example of a map created by the extension The Blog Post I drafted a blog post that introduced me as an avid user of Facebook Messenger. The post highlighted the fact that the Facebook Messenger App transmits geo-locations alongside many of the messages sent from mobile devices. The post went on to describe how the Marauder's Map extension aggregates this data onto a map. It noted that, at least on Android devices, the default setting for Messenger sends geo-location with messages. The blog also provided some examples from using the extension, including how a person's geo-location can accumulate over time to reveal travel patterns and other information. Publicizing the Blog On May 26, 2015, I published the blog post and corresponding code on Medium.com. [18] I also posted URL links to the blog post and extension to both Reddit (reddit.com/r/privacy) [19], a popular forum for discussions on data privacy, and Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) [20], a popular technical forum. Medium, Reddit, and Hacker News all have a voting system so that the most interesting articles are voted (or recommended) upwards to the top listings. Finally, using my public Twitter handle (@arankhanna), I sent out a tweet [21] asking my followers, consisting mainly of family and friends, to read the post. This study used, as one measure of public concern over Facebook Messenger's sharing of geo-location data, the popularity ranking of my posts on the three sites. If the public response to the posts was indifferent, then the ratings would likely not increase on these forums. This study also examined the quantity of news coverage received and the total number of downloads of the extension as other measures of public concern. Finally, the study examined Facebook's response to any public concern. Results Media Coverage News of the blog went viral, starting within 24 hours of posting and continuing for about 72 hours afterwards. For the first 12 hours of posting, little happened. The Reddit post received 7 upvotes, the Hacker News link also received 7 upvotes, and the Medium story had 3 recommendations by the end of the day. By the morning of the 27th, the story gained momentum on Twitter. Figures 8 and 9 show the Twitter responses to my posts over the week after I initially posted the blog. A total of 611 tweets and retweets reached a total follower audience of 3.63 million Twitter users. Figure 8. Twitter Activity after initial blog post. The total number of tweets about my posts per day between 5/26 and 5/31. Of the public tweets, 57% appeared on 5/27 as the story initially went viral globally and hit the front page of various forums such as Medium, Reddit Privacy, and Hacker News. The Twitter data for Figures 8, 9, and 12 was gathered by searching through all public Tweets between 5/26 and 6/5 (using Twitter's native search) for mentions of my name, my Twitter handle, Marauder's Map, and links to any of my postings and then recording all relevant tweets, their author, and their time of release. Figure 9. Twitter timeline. Total reach of tweets about my posts over the active hours between 5/26 and 5/29. The total number of tweets and retweets was 611 and the total number of Twitter followers reached was 3.63M. The measure of reach is the number of followers the tweets were delivered to. The figure shows the total number of tweets and the total number of followers reached. The biggest boost came from Medium.com, which tweeted about the post and promoted it on its site. The tweets from the largest influencers (those with over 10k followers) are labeled. The increased traffic to my posts raised their rankings. For example, my post on Medium became the most recommended story of the day. Posts linking to my blog and extension on both Hacker News and Reddit Privacy rose to the front page of both by 8 a.m. PST. By 9 a.m. PST, tech bloggers and content aggregators including The Next Web, Computerworld, and The Huffington Post covered the story in their blog posts and articles. The Huffington Post asked to directly cross-publish my Medium blog post on its site. Afterward, information about my posts spread to Al Jazeera, The International Business Times, and other major news organizations. Figure 10. Press coverage after initial blog post. The total number of press stories about my posts per day between 5/25 and 6/5. I gathered the news data for Figures 10, 11, and 12 by searching for mentions of my name, my Twitter handle, Marauder's Map and links to any of my postings between 5/26 and 6/5 on Google News and recording all relevant stories, their author, their time of release and their country of origin. By the 28th, only two days after my original posting, news stories about my posts appeared on CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and many large international European, Australian, and Brazilian publications (e.g. La Stampa, Der Standard, Globo, NDTV, The Sydney Herald). By the 28th, large TV networks such as CNBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN had covered my posts as well. Figure 11 shows the total number of stories written about my posts per country. Figure 11. News coverage count by country. Count of news publications about my posts published on or before 6/5 grouped by country of origin. The United States, Europe and India were the top three origins for stories overall, with the United States accounting for over a third of all stories written. Figure 12. Twitter activity and news coverage by day. Number of tweets (right vertical axis) and press stories (left vertical axis) about my posts per day between 5/27 and 6/5. The total count of news publications was 178 and the total count of tweets was 347. The count of tweets and stories appearing on peak days are displayed. Extension Downloads There have been more than 85,000 downloads of the Chrome extension since its release (Figure 6). Users continued to download the extension even after I deactivated it in response to Facebook's request, as described below. Facebook's Response The afternoon of the 27th, one day after the Medium blog post's publication, Facebook contacted me. My future manager phoned and asked me not to speak to any press; however, I was told that I could keep my blog post up. By that evening, the global communications lead for privacy and public policy at Facebook called me to clarify Facebook's expectations that I not speak to the press, saying that his objective was to hamper the spread of what had become a damaging story. By midday of the 28th, the global communications lead for privacy and public policy at Facebook requested by email that I disable the extension. I complied within the hour by deactivating the Mapbox API key associated with the extension so that all current and future users could no longer load the map used to display geo-location data. On the morning of the 29th, three days after my initial posts, media reported that my Chrome extension was turned off and no longer viable. Additionally, Facebook had tweaked its code to remove location data from browsers. This alteration did not change Facebook's policy of collecting and sharing geo-location data by default from the Facebook Messenger app on Android and with user permission on iOS. However, Facebook no longer transmitted this location data to browsers. This action merely halted the use of an extension such as mine that uses browser data. Geo-locations remained visible on the Facebook Messenger mobile application, and seemingly, the map could be rebuilt using an interface to the mobile application. On the afternoon of the 29th, three days after my initial posts, Facebook phoned me to inform me that it was rescinding the offer of a summer internship, citing as a reason that the extension violated the Facebook user agreement by "scraping" the site. The head of global human resources and recruiting followed up with an email message stating that my blog post did not reflect the "high ethical standards" around user privacy expected of interns. According to the email, the privacy issue was not with Facebook Messenger, but rather with my blog post and code describing how Facebook collected and shared users' geo-location data. On June 4, nine days after my original posts, Facebook officially announced a Messenger update with a new feature requiring users to opt into sharing their location during chats. Sharing would no longer be the default. The press release did not mention the previous default settings for geo-location data and did not disclose with whom Facebook would share the previously collected data. [22] As of June 2015, shared geo-location data from before the update remains viewable on the mobile application, and users who did not update to the new versions of the Messenger app on iOS and Android still share geo-locations in the same manner as before. Discussion At the beginning of the study, historical behavior by Facebook and its users suggested that there might not be significant public concern about Facebook Messenger's sharing of geo-location data. Even though the media had highlighted the issue four years earlier, Facebook had not been concerned enough to make any fundamental change to its software. So, why the big change now? What seems to have made the difference was transparency. It is possible that before my extension and blog post, the degree of location data collection and sharing by Facebook Messenger was hard for an average user to notice and thus did not raise significant concern. Without public pressure, Facebook may have lacked significant incentive to change. My extension and blog post made the data collection and sharing practice real and transparent. The resulting public attention, with over 85,000 downloads of my tool, more than 170 news articles, and 3.6 million Twitter users exposed to my posts through tweets and retweets, seemed to motivate Facebook to react. What does this say about privacy protection? Can we reasonably expect Facebook or others with an interest in collecting and sharing personal data, to be responsible guardians of privacy? Could this work have been done inside Facebook to understand how its users view the collection and sharing of their data? Must future privacy guardians always be on the outside? References 1. Darwell B. Facebook's frictionless sharing mistake. SocialTimes. January 22, 2013. http:/ / www.adweek.com/ socialtimes/ facebooks-frictionless-sharing-mistake/ 289289 2. Facebook. Making It Easier to Share With Who You Want. May 22, 2014. http:/ / newsroom.fb.com/ news/ 2014/ 05/ news-feed-fyi-giving-people-more-control-over-when-they-share-from-apps/ 3. Hamburger E. Facebook gives up on automatically posting everything you do online. The Verge. May 27, 2014. http:/ / www.theverge.com/ 2014/ 5/ 27/ 5754862/ facebook-gives-up-on-automatically-sharing-everything-you-do-online-open-graph 4. Popper B. Facebook's social reader apps nosedive in popularity. The Verge. May 7, 2012. http:/ / www.theverge.com/ 2012/ 5/ 7/ 3005580/ facebook-open-graph-frictionless-social-reader-decline 5. Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT. ICRI/ CIR and iMinds-SMIT advise Belgian Privacy Commission in Facebook investigation. KU Leuven. March 31, 2015. http:/ / www.law.kuleuven.be/ icri/ en/ news/ item/ icri-cir-advises-belgian-privacy-commission-in-facebook-investigation 6. Because Facebook in Europe officially operates out of Ireland, the firm states that it formally abides by Irish regulations in the EU. See Facebook. Facebook Response to European Commission Communication on personal data protection in the European Union. Accessed July 30, 2015. http:/ / ec.europa.eu/ justice/ news/ consulting_public/ 0006/ contributions/ not_registered/ facebook_en.pdf 7. Facebook. A Faster Way to Message on Mobile. October 9, 2011. https:/ / www.facebook.com/ notes/ facebook/ a-faster-way-to-message-on-mobile/ 10150249543542131 8. McHugh M. Facebook Messenger Will Finally Stop Telling People Where You Are. Wired. June 5, 2015. http:/ / www.wired.com/ 2015/ 06/ stop-facebook-messenger-telling-people/ 9. Burnham K. Facebook Messenger: 5 Misconceptions. InformationWeek. August 11, 2014. http:/ / www.informationweek.com/ software/ social/ facebook-messenger-5-misconceptions/ d/ d-id/ 1297913 10. Facebook Messages. https:/ / www.facebook.com/ messages/ 11. Nickinson P. How to keep Facebook Messenger from sharing your location. Android Central. August 9, 2014. http:/ / www.androidcentral.com/ how-keep-facebook-messenger-sharing-your-location 12. Ciprani J. How to prevent Facebook Messenger from sharing your location. CNET. May 10, 2012. http:/ / www.cnet.com/ how-to/ how-to-prevent-facebook-messenger-from-sharing-your-location/ 13. Brinkmann M. Beware: Facebook Messenger Reveals Locations, Introduces Read Confirmations. gHacks Tech News. May 5, 2012. http:/ / www.ghacks.net/ 2012/ 05/ 05/ beware-facebook-messenger-reveals-locations-introduces-read-confirmations/ 14. Murphy D. Facebook Adds Locations, Read Receipts to Messenger App. PCMag. May 6, 2012. http:/ / www.pcmag.com/ article2/ 0,2817,2404031,00.asp 15. Letter from Mark Zuckerberg pg. 67-70 of Facebook. Form S-1 for United States Securities and Exchange Commission. February 1, 2012. http:/ / www.sec.gov/ Archives/ edgar/ data/ 1326801/ 000119312512034517/ d287954ds1.htm#toc287954_10 16. arankhanna25. Marauders Map. Chrome Web Store. May 26, 2015. https:/ / chrome.google.com/ webstore/ detail/ marauders-map/ mliofombcghaamgjkmmmmlepkiacdhkh 17. arank. marauders-map. Github. May 26. 2015. https:/ / github.com/ arank/ marauders-map 18. Khanna A. Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger. Medium. May 26, 2015. https:/ / medium.com/ @arankhanna/ stalking-your-friends-with-facebook-messenger-9da8820bd27d 19. arankhanna. I wrote a chrome extension to show how easy it is to track your friends' locations with Facebook Messenger. Reddit. May 26, 2015. https:/ / www.reddit.com/ r/ privacy/ comments/ 37db80/ i_wrote_a_chrome_extension_to_show_how_easy_it_is/ 20. arankhanna. Hacker News. May 26, 2015. https:/ / news.ycombinator.com/ submitted?id=arankhanna 21. @arankhanna. Check out this blog + extension I wrote about how your friends can track you from Facebook Messenger https:/ / medium.com/ @arankhanna/ stalking-your-friends-with-facebook-messenger-9da8820bd27d … . Twitter. May 26, 2015. https:/ / twitter.com/ arankhanna/ status/ 603293036693463040 22. Facebook. A New Way to Send a Location in Messenger. June 4, 2015. http:/ / newsroom.fb.com/ news/ 2015/ 06/ a-new-way-to-send-a-location-in-messenger/ Authors Aran Khanna is a senior at Harvard College majoring in Computer Science joint with Mathematics. During his time at Harvard he has interned at Microsoft, Novus, a hedge fund data analysis startup based in New York City, and Marianas Labs, a deep learning startup based in Mountain View. Aran is an active blogger in his free time and is passionate about the impact the increasing role of technology in our lives is having on our privacy. Referring Editor: Latanya Sweeney Citation Khanna A. Facebook's Privacy Incident Response: a study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger. Technology Science. 2015081101. August 11, 2015. https://techscience.org/a/2015081101 Data Khanna A. Replication Data for: Facebook's Privacy Incident Response, a study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger. Harvard Dataverse. August 10, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/D2SNRI Suggestions Enter your recommendation for follow-up or ongoing work in the box at the end of the page. Feel free to provide ideas for next steps, follow-on research, or other research inspired by this paper. Perhaps someone will read your comment, do the described work, and publish a paper about it. What do you recommend as a next research step? Suggestion 1 How does Facebook's Privacy Policy or Facebook's License Agreement for the app at the time match these changes in Facebook Messenger's default on sharing personal geolocation? How do these compare with other apps that share personal geolocation data with other users? [Editors] Suggestion 2 The demonstration code in this paper used the browser. Is the same information still available if you wrote code that could access the information that would be delivered to a mobile phone? [Editors] Suggestion 3 Which news outlets were critical in spreading the word? Have these information flows been instrumental in possibly influencing other technology changes? [Editors] Suggestion 4 I would like to see some ethnographic studies that elucidate the depth of understanding of this issue by the "common man." How is privacy understood by older or less tech savvy individuals? How likely are these people to be aware of these issues? What protections should exist for those who are not knowledgeable enough to protect themselves? Suggestion 5 Interview with Apple's Tim Cook and get on his privacy/secyurity team! (And thanks for the important difference you've already made.) Continued Good Luck on your career! Suggestion 6 First of all, thank you for your great work. I would like to see more studies about privacy awareness in people. What will make people act? What makes companies act? Suggestion 7 Excellent analysis of the information dissemination through various channels Aran! I would like to see more studies that track information dissemination. What are good ways to collect that data? Suggestion 8 Maybe this was a feature in messenger, not a flaw. Maybe opt-out rather than opt-in made for a better user experience. I would like to see a study about utility. Did users like it better the other way? Or, are users indifferent to the change? Is anyone complaining about the change? Your paper suggests that the media coverage made a difference. Is the media response a good proxy for how users feel? Suggestion 9 Remember the Golden Rule: He with the Gold makes the rules. Being correct and right in the context of an angry employer... ramifications. I would like to know whether an employee can ever really do this kind of work effectively? Suggestion 10 I would like to see a study of whistle blower laws. Maybe they need to be beefed up. Suggestion 11 This is a brilliant study and exposes the lack of privacy concerns by companies like Facebook, which pay little more than lip service to an issue that most Internet users care about deeply. I'm sure Facebook felt its collective "face" flush over the embarrassment of this, got indignant and revoked the student's internship. Instead, the company should have hired him on the spot. A company that exalts itself as encouraging hacking culture, as Facebook does, would have been a good candidate to have hired him, but they did not. I would like to see a study about corporate structures and cultures to better understand the internal pressures that lead to this outcome, which seems typical. Suggestion 12 Question: Did the author Mr.Khanna consult his supervisor before publishing the tool? Did he even know who his Facebook supervisor might be? He did this work while he was still at school and before the summer internship started. Mr. Khanna said he promptly complied with Facebook instructions to stop the demo. I would like a study about the role and responsibilities of summer interns who do research at school and who are employees for a summer. How does this work? Can only students who will never do research related to a company be hired by the company? Should students who want to be hired never do this kind of research? It seems optimal to have students interested in doing this kind of work actually being hired by these companies. Is that possible? Suggestion 13 It's not just FACEBOOK that's doing this. I would like to see a study of geolocation sharing across apps. Suggestion 14 Excellent work. I would like to vote up Suggestion 4. I am quite common, with zero tech savvy. Yet even I can recognize the implications of hacking and tracking personal devices without the user's knowledge and my concern is dismissed by most as paranoia. I would love to know what the tipping point might be for people. We love our wired world and we have willingly put on blinders, when are we forced to look and know? Suggestion 15 I write this not to thank Mr. Khanna. If the number of people who tweeted is in millions then the number of passive people would probably be at least 10 times. I was surprised by the fact that geolocation pin points to within a meter. That's scary. I would like a study that tracks how much of a person's time is captured in someone's geo-location database. If I carry my mobile phone with me all the time, then how often does some database somewhere know where I am? Suggestion 16 Very interesting. It would be interesting too to know how many times similar historical private information's (like users position, calls, messages, etc.) have been accessed after creation dates, from what location, read only or modified, moved to another category/location, etc. The metadata of archived files for alpha individuals and for beta groups (e.g., by interests, age, location, incomes) can provide many details. An analyze from this reversed point of view, of how the databases in question are used further by their owners, could reveal their objects of interest (not really connected with targeted advertising), as well as lots of details about the interested persons behind. Suggestion 17 It would be interesting to learn how much is known by vulnerable populations about about default location sharing of Facebook and other apps. Victims of domestic violence, jurors, and police are examples of populations that may be vulnerable in different ways. Suggestion 18 If only facebook itself views my geo location, it wouldn't be an issue for me. But if others can see it, then it is. I would like to see a survey of personal attitudes towards geolocation sharing. Suggestion 19 When Facebook started selling mobile ads in 2012, not even the keenest optimists could have predicted how big a success they would become. In each of the past ten quarters, mobile ads have accounted for more then 90% of Facebook's revenue growth. In the first six months of 2015, all of the company's growth came from advertising on tablets and smartphones. Mobile ad revenue now accounts for 76 percent of Facebook's advertising revenue and 72 percent of total revenue. I would be interested to know the role of geo-tagging in FB`s revenues as stated above. If all users disabled their geo-tagging, what will be the impact on FB to sell customized ads. Suggestion 20 I cannot find out "Is geo-location so important to be used by applications". I mean it should be an option like "What's App" gives share your location , only with those we want to share and not by default with all. Pin-point accurate geo-location is not necessary rather only the region from which the user is online is sufficient to share. I appreciate the way Mr. Aran did the whole analysis and presentation systematically. Big companies should take care of their users who blindly believe and uses their applications and should seek prior permission before collection and share of user's data about location. I would like to see a study to know if more gross geo-location reporting would work as well in many apps that use geo-location. Suggestion 21 I see that you do not cite names from Facebook, which understandably is in keeping with most academic guidelines and with most human subject considerations. Everything should be documented and if applicable in writing such as your internship. The fact your paper does not give names of specific people does not hold them accountable for thier actions, and makes investigations much harder. I would have had a signed legal internship document before I moved. I would like to see, among other things, an ethongraphic study that interviews employees and includes those involved. For that, I assume if researchers contact you that you will share the names of the people. Suggestion 22 Found your site on Google. This is a cool post. I'd like to see you take the main idea from this article and carete another second experiment, and maybe you could embed a vid, also? Suggestion 23 Read this article because of my school assignment. Do we still have privacy? Thank you for educating people and making me aware of everything that is happening now. Suggestion 24 Apparently, when you download a copy of your Facebook data, it also downloads a .txt file called "security". If opened with MS Word, it shows ALL account activity, used cookies, user agents, IP addresses, estimated geolocations and administrative records such as name changes and checkpoint accesses. At this point, we all know that Facebook collects data on its users. But perhaps you could demonstrate how vast that data is. Submit your suggestion We welcome your ideas for next steps and additional research related to this paper. This is not a general discussion forum, and the moderator will not post unrelated contributions. 
 
 
 
 Your email address (recommended for communication with our office, but not posted unless you additionally place it in the suggestion itself): 
 
 Type the text shown in the box on the left, then click submit. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Back to top 
 
 ||||| Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger 
 
 Aran Khanna Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 26, 2015 
 
 Edit: At Facebook’s request I have again deactivated the *official* version of the extension. Furthermore, Facebook has deactivated location sharing from the desktop webpage so the extension will not work. 
 
 When I came to college Facebook Messenger became an integral part of my digital life. I quickly found that it was the easiest way to keep in touch with old high school friends, contact people I had just met, organize impromptu poker games with people I hardly knew, and everything in between. However, I didn't realize how much data about me Messenger was revealing to the people I chatted with until last week when I began tinkering with my message history. 
 
 As you may know, when you send a message from the Messenger app there is an option to send your location with it. What I realized was that almost every other message in my chats had a location attached to it, so I decided to have some fun with this data. I wrote a Chrome extension for the Facebook Messenger page (https://www.facebook.com/messages/) that scrapes all this location data and plots it on a map. You can get this extension here and play around with it on your message data. 
 
 A screenshot of the map the extension creates: 
 
 What I Found 
 
 You may not believe that there are enough of these location tagged messages to provide truly invasive data on any one person, since they must be on mobile, with GPS on, and choose to share their location for it to be sent… right? 
 
 What you should keep in mind is that the mobile app for Facebook Messenger defaults to sending a location with all messages. 
 
 You can see this location data by clicking on individual messages in the mobile app to reveal a map of where they were sent from. 
 
 You can tell if your location is being shared in a message if the little GPS icon next to the text-box is colored blue. 
 
 Go ahead and see how many messages in your chats have locations attached. I’m guessing it’s a lot of them. And if this isn't already starting to get a bit weird, the first thing I noticed when I started to write my code was that the latitude and longitude coordinates of the message locations have more than 5 decimal places of precision, making it possible to pinpoint the sender’s location to less than a meter. 
 
 Coordinates scraped by my code for two of my friends. 
 
 Once the extension was written I naturally started seeing what kind of things I could discover about my Facebook friends. 
 
 I am in a pretty active group chat with some of my brother’s friends (who I am friends with on Facebook but don’t know too well). They are all fairly active on the chat, posting once a day or more. 
 
 Let’s pick on the one who goes to Stanford. By simply looking at the cluster of messages sent late at night you can tell exactly where his dorm is, and in fact approximately where his room is located in that dorm. 
 
 Where my acquaintance who goes to Stanford sleeps. 
 
 Furthermore, by gathering a couple weeks’ worth of chat data on the map and looking at the location clusters you can even figure out his weekly schedule. With this you can predict exactly which building he would be in at a given time. 
 
 The location history data over the course of a few weeks for my Stanford acquaintance. 
 
 In fact I found that I could infer a schedule for almost everyone in this chat as well as the other active chats I am in. 
 
 Highlighted the important location clusters for another Facebook friend who is a student at UW 
 
 I found that I could even do this for people who I am not Facebook friends with. I am currently in a large active chat to organize poker games with some fellow students, many of whom I am not Facebook friends with. However, I can still track their locations extremely accurately from the messages they send the group. 
 
 The detailed location history of someone I am not friends with on Facebook 
 
 You can now see the fun (and slightly creepy) things this data allows you to do. But wait there's more! One day when I was chatting frequently with a friend of mine (@tomasreimers) the map allowed me to track his hour by hour locations. At the end of that day the location history on the map closely matched the location history collected by his phone. 
 
 Additionally, this map aggregates the location data from all the messages that I send. For the days I was frequently on messenger (posting to different conversations every hour or so), my location history on this map lined up very closely with my phone’s location history. 
 
 My scraped messenger location history for a certain active day 
 
 My Android phone’s location history for that same day. 
 
 This means that if a few people who I am chatting with separately collude and send each other the locations I share with them, they would be able to track me very accurately without me ever knowing. 
 
 If you want to map your friends’ locations to see for yourself how fun (and creepy) this data is you can download the extension for Chrome here. The code is also available and open source on Github. 
 
 For those of you already wanting out here is a great guide on how to ensure you don’t send your locations from the Messenger app. 
 
 What’s The Problem? 
 
 Let me reiterate that I still find Facebook Messenger extremely useful and use it religiously, albeit with location sharing now turned off. This may lead you to wonder if there really is a problem here, since there is always option to not share your exact coordinates with messages. However, everyone I have shown this extension to has been anywhere from surprised to appalled that this much of their very personal data is online for their friends (and even complete strangers) to access. So it is seems that there is an issue. 
 
 Let’s start at the root of the problem: why do so many people give up their location data so readily on Messenger? 
 
 The main problem is that every time you open your phone and send a single message it’s so easy to forget about your location data being attached to it. Furthermore, it seems so harmless to attach a location with a single message, but the problem is over time the information from these messages adds up. 
 
 Both of these issues in some way stem from the fact that locations are not only included by default, but also are rather subtly placed in the UI. The power of defaults on human behavior is well documented in psychology and suggests that few people will put in the effort to deviate from the default action of sharing. Furthermore, because there are no readily visible consequences to sharing your location, users are never incentivized to devote attention to what this default of sharing is actually revealing about them. 
 
 I decided to write this extension, because we are constantly being told how we are losing privacy with the increasing digitization of our lives, however the consequences never seem tangible. With this code you can see for yourself the potentially invasive usage of the information you share, and decide for yourself if this is something you should worry about. 
 
 If you found this interesting you may also enjoy my post on Venmo’s privacy flaws and the extension I made to reveal them.
– Talk about being too good at your non-job. A Harvard University junior lost his Facebook internship two hours before he had planned to travel to it after he exploited a privacy issue in the social network's Messenger system. Aran Khanna discussed his experience and findings in a paper published in Harvard's Technology Science journal. "From 2011 to the start of this study in May 2015, Facebook Messenger collected and shared user geo-locations as the default setting for every message sent from the Android mobile app," he writes. The flaw was that those locations could be seen by anyone in a group chat, even if the person who sent the message wasn't friends with everyone else in the group. And so Khanna developed a browser app called Marauder's Map that exposed, on a map, the geo-location data that was being shared. He tweeted about his Chrome extension and posted about it on Medium on May 26. By the 28th, CNN, the Washington Post, and many others had covered his findings; the extension was downloaded 85,000 times. That same day, Facebook asked Khanna to disable the app; he did. The company also deactivated location sharing on desktops and released a June 4 update that required users to opt in to location sharing. It also withdrew Khanna's internship, which was to start on June 1. The official reason given was a violation of the "high ethical standards expected of interns," according to Boston.com. "This mapping tool scraped Facebook data in a way that violated our terms," a Facebook rep tells the site. Khanna says his app was created using his own Messenger history, not data scraping. "I didn't write the program to be malicious," he says. Khanna ended up securing an internship with another Silicon Valley firm. (This alleged intern tale of woe involves the Olsen twins.)