Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
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Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#2What testing?
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#3Annoyingly easy to discredit this article as a disgruntled former-employee trying to stick it to Facebook/Meta.
I'm no fan of Facebook, seriously.
But it's hard to take an article like this at face value.
Was he fired for not doing his job, and his grievance was a reframed legitimate problem (IE doing data analysis in the background will run down the battery)?
Was he just laid off during this most recent round of layoffs and is reframing it as an injustice for him fighting for users?
We only have his word, and there only needs to be a hint of truth to make it easy to digest.
See also: It's hard not to know what you're getting into with Facebook, especially in the role this person took. Data analysis is the name of the game.
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#4Annoyingly easy to discredit this article as a disgruntled former-employee trying to stick it to Facebook/Meta. I'm no fan of Facebook, seriously. But it's hard to take an article like this at face value. Was he fired for not doing his job, and his grievance was a reframed legitimate problem (IE doing data analysis in the background will run down the battery)? Was he just laid off during this most recent round of lay…
The article says he was fired for not running the test and reporting to his manager that it was wrong
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#5What testing?
The claim in TFA is they run a/b style tests where a sample group would have their battery deliberately drained to test performance of the app in low-power situations.
Based on the general fixation on tests at Meta and Alphabet et al, it seems pretty plausible to me that they might try such a thing although:
1) the article is just the employee's claims in the context of employment arbitration, rather than evidence. For example they claim to have been shown a document about running such tests, but it's not clear whether that document has been entered into evidence (and certainly not made public). That document would presumably be subject to discovery in a lawsuit, although in arbitration it's unlikely it would be in the public record unless someone with standing made a freedom of information request (which may or may not reveal it).
2) It seems to me such a test would be unnecessary regardless of the ethics of it. You could just look at instances when a user's battery was low organically without draining it on purpose. The installed base is large enough that this would almost certainly work just as well for most practical purposes.
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#6Annoyingly easy to discredit this article as a disgruntled former-employee trying to stick it to Facebook/Meta. I'm no fan of Facebook, seriously. But it's hard to take an article like this at face value. Was he fired for not doing his job, and his grievance was a reframed legitimate problem (IE doing data analysis in the background will run down the battery)? Was he just laid off during this most recent round of lay…
I don't think someone would risk being attached the "faking the reason for firing" label and become harder to employ and fake stuff like that then go public with it. I mean sure it is possible, but lying about stuff like that is on stupid end of spectrum
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#7Annoyingly easy to discredit this article as a disgruntled former-employee trying to stick it to Facebook/Meta. I'm no fan of Facebook, seriously. But it's hard to take an article like this at face value. Was he fired for not doing his job, and his grievance was a reframed legitimate problem (IE doing data analysis in the background will run down the battery)? Was he just laid off during this most recent round of lay…
I don't think someone would risk being attached the "faking the reason for firing" label and become harder to employ and fake stuff like that then go public with it. I mean sure it is possible, but lying about stuff like that is on stupid end of spectrum
I also don't think people do stupid things when angry
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#8I can't shake the feeling of how 'double' this is. One one hand, yes this is like criminal behavior. On the other hand: the difference in battery drain rate between a phone running stock Android vs the same phone running for instance LineageOS for MicroG is also pretty big whereas for the user-facing functionality it can do the exact same thing.
In other words: in my view if you get a smartphone these days you are in fact already buying into a device which can save your life, but needs to maintain a charge to do that. And on which the vendor is essentially already doing as they please, and not to your benefit, since you agreed with that somehow, and all of that drains of course battery. This particular operation is just one of many. Just somewhat more direct.
(shouldn't this link to the original article (https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refu...) instead of what looks like almost a complete copy-paste?)
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#9I miss the part that explains WHY they would drain a battery. What kind of outcome has this test?
Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
#10What testing?
The claim in TFA is they run a/b style tests where a sample group would have their battery deliberately drained to test performance of the app in low-power situations. Based on the general fixation on tests at Meta and Alphabet et al, it seems pretty plausible to me that they might try such a thing although: 1) the article is just the employee's claims in the context of employment arbitration, rather than evidence. F…
Plus 2) would require additional design, engineering and QA work to implement the code to drain users' batteries. And it would cause plenty of users to uninstall/complain if Messenger was draining huge amounts of battery. It really doesn't make sense considering Messenger has 1.3 billion users, and remaining battery percent would likely be a bell curve across all users regardless of sample size.