Despite its enormous popularity, Facebook has always been the subject of debates. The social media platform has previously been accused of many things, from privacy risk to targeted advertising. The app drains cell phone batteries, according to a new claim made by one of the company’s former employees.
Company’s negative testing practice:
A practice known as “negative testing,” which enables tech companies to covertly drain a significant portion of cell phone batteries in the name of running features or issues like how an image would upload or how quickly the app runs, was disclosed by George Hayward, a data scientist who worked for Facebook’s Messenger app, according to the New York Post.
Hayward claims that when he came to know about the negative testing feature, he discussed it with his manager who replied, “by harming a few we can help the greater masses.” Hayward claims in his lawsuit that he was fired for saying no to negative testing practice.
“I refused to do this test,” Hayward told the news company, adding, “It turns out if you tell your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ it doesn’t go over very well.”
Hayward, who was hired in 2019, stated that although he is unsure of the precise number of Facebook users affected, he is confident that the company engages in negative testing. This is because he was given an internal training document titled, “How to run thoughtful negative tests,” which included examples of such trials runs conducted by the company.
“I have never seen a more horrible document in my career,” he said.
More issues linked with the app:
Facebook has long been charged with stealing battery power from mobile devices. Since 2015, news reports have claimed that even when the Facebook iOS app is closed, it uses a significant amount of the phone’s battery.
In order to find out how the Facebook app affected the performance of an LG G4 Android phone, Redditor pbrandes_eth was inspired by the Android blogger Russell Holly in 2016. They discovered that when Facebook and Messenger were not installed, apps opened on the phone 15% faster than when they were.
