If you have the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps installed on your smartphone, you may have noticed that your phone’s battery drains faster than other people who don’t have them.
If we are to believe former Facebook employee George Hayward, a data scientist, this might make sense, as Facebook can secretly drain the battery of its users’ phones on purpose, according to collect NY Post.
What Facebook does is called “negative tests” and can drain the phone’s battery to test an app’s features or see an image load.
Hayward was fired by Facebook parent Meta for refusing to participate in the negative tests. I told the director: ‘This can harm someone’, and she answered me that “By hurting a few we can help the great masses.”
Hayward was fired from Meta in November and filed a lawsuit against the company. In the lawsuit, Hayward’s attorney, Dan Kaiser, noted that draining the battery of users’ phones endangers people, especially “in circumstances where they need to communicate with others, including, but not limited to, the police or other rescue teams.”
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 do this test. It turns out that if you say to your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ it doesn’t look very good.”
When he was an employee, the company provided Hayward with an internal training document titled “How to Perform Thoughtful Negative Testing”. The document included examples of how to perform such tests. After reading the document, Hayward said that she It seemed that Facebook had used negative tests before. And he added: “I have never seen a more horrible document in my career.”
