If you have the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps installed on your smartphone, you might have noticed that your phone’s battery drains faster than other people who don’t.
If former Facebook employee George Hayward, a data scientist, is to be believed, this might make sense, as Facebook can secretly drain the battery of its users’ phones on purpose, according to the collection NY Post.
What Facebook does is called “negative tests” and can drain your phone’s battery to test an app’s capabilities or see an image load.
Hayward was fired by Facebook parent Meta for refusing to participate in the negative tests. I said to the director: ‘This could harm someone’, and she replied that “By harming a few, we can help the broad masses.”
Hayward was fired from Meta in November and filed a lawsuit against the company. In the filing, Hayward’s attorney, Dan Kaiser, noted that draining the battery of users’ phones puts people in danger, especially “in circumstances where they need to communicate with others, including, but not limited to, the police or other rescuers.”
Originally hired in 2019, Hayward received a six-figure annual salary from Meta. But when the company’s request to test negative came through, Hayward said: “I refused to take this test. Turns out if you say to your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ it doesn’t sound very good.”
When he was an employee, the company provided Hayward with an internal training document entitled “How to perform thoughtful negative tests”. The document included examples of how to perform such tests. After reading the document, Hayward said that It looked like Facebook had used negative tests before. And he added: “I have never seen a more horrible document in my career.”