Facebook Dumps Intern for Exposing Major Privacy Flaw, Twitter Expected to Name Jack Dorsey CEO
This week, Facebook decided not to keep a Harvard student's internship for the rest of the summer, after he exposed a major privacy flaw in the social network's Messenger app. Meanwhile, it looks like beleaguered Twitter will look to Jack Dorsey for permanent leadership, as the company is expected to announce his transition from interim CEO to long-term chief executive next week.
It's time for Social Media Sunday!
Messenger Flaw? Fire that Intern!
In May, Arun Khanna, a Harvard student who about to start his summer internship at Facebook, posted information about a flaw in the company's Messenger app on his Medium page. We previously wrote about the blog post and program -- a Chrome extension called "Maurauder's Map" -- created by Khanna that allowed users to "stalk their friends" using Facebook Messenger, due to the fact that the app was set to track users' locations by default. (To prevent location sharing, you can go to the Settings Apps on Android or iOS and disable location tracking under "Location" and "Privacy" respectively, by the way).
That bit of hacking eventually cost Khanna his internship with the company this week, according to Quartz. Facebook said it had been working on an update for Messenger to improve location privacy and asked Khanna to disable the extension. He did, but later Facebook's head of HR reportedly told the programmer that his blog post didn't meet the ethical standards required for interns at the company and let him go.
Khanna is now reportedly spending the rest of his summer at a startup.
Jack Dorsey to Be Named CEO Soon?
Twitter has been through a lot this year, but after Dick Costolo resigned as head of the company in the beginning of the summer, it appears the company has been happy with the leadership of interim CEO (and former co-founder of Twitter) Jack Dorsey. Happy enough to hire him on a long-term basis, if a rumor report by the New York Post turns out to be true.
According to Wall Street analyst Robert Peck, Twitter is prepared to announce Jack Dorsey as the permanent CEO of Twitter as soon as next week. Currently, Dorsey is the CEO of mobile payment services company Square, a position he is unlikely to leave, even as head of Twitter.
Although sharing time between Square and Twitter isn't a perfect situation, Dorsey is rumored to be getting help from two other long-time Twitter leads: Adam Bain, Twitter's current revenue chief, is expected to become president and COO and Ev Williams, one of Dorsey's Twitter co-founders, is expected to become chairman.
Another Big (Little) Change
Twitter, the company based on 140-character limits for its tweets, just abolished that limit -- for direct messages. According to Mashable, your tweets will still be limited by the 140-character standard, but in direct messages with other users, you can go beyond bite-sized messages.
The removal of the limit was actually announced the same day Dorsey took the (interim) reigns from Costolo, but Twitter began rolling out the change this week after making a detailed announcement about how Direct Messages was changing in on the company's blog on Wednesday.
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