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Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

phonearena.com

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Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#21

Post by dijit »

throwaway69123 wrote: post #11
dijit wrote: post #3

Annoyingly 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…

What is the point this comment is trying to make ?

I find it hard, despite hating Facebook, to believe the article with the lack of evidence and how easy it would be to explain the symptoms described as part of another (less intentionally malicious) operation.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#22

Post by psychphysic »

I'm gonna need this explained cause I can't make heads or tails of it.

So companies make apps behaviour poorly for a subset of users. In this case run down a battery. Why?

It seems he refuses to roll that out, but Facebook seems to have guidelines about how to do it? This seems bonkers.

Is the idea to find out how far you can go before someone uninstalls? Or what?

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#23

Post by Haga »

psychphysic wrote: post #22

I'm gonna need this explained cause I can't make heads or tails of it. So companies make apps behaviour poorly for a subset of users. In this case run down a battery. Why? It seems he refuses to roll that out, but Facebook seems to have guidelines about how to do it? This seems bonkers. Is the idea to find out how far you can go before someone uninstalls? Or what?

Basically, your phone is picked as a test phone, were software tests run in the background. That's how I understand it.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#24

Post by avgcorrection »

dijit wrote: post #3

Annoyingly 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…

Easy to discredit a comment which only comes up with explanations which disfavors one of the sides.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#25

Post by friendlyHornet »

dijit wrote: post #21
throwaway69123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point this comment is trying to make ?

I find it hard, despite hating Facebook, to believe the article with the lack of evidence and how easy it would be to explain the symptoms described as part of another (less intentionally malicious) operation.

What sort of evidence are you looking for? Source code?

I would agree with you if his name was kept anonymous but since he's attaching his reputation to this claim, it makes it slightly more believable

Unfortunately it remains an unfalsifiable claim so I am skeptical, as well, but I won't dismiss this outright

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#26

Post by linker3000 »

Lanrei wrote: post #20
linker3000 wrote: post #14

I couldn't get to phonearena.com, and when I checked it's in one of the default lists used by Adblocker on OpenWrt (adaway, adguard, disconnect, yoyo): ::: ::: domain 'phonearena.com' in active blocklist ::: + phonearena.com Any thoughts!!? Edit: Is there a good site or script to run through the Adblock lists, check them and report the location of matches?

The only thing that I could find was from 2017, where phonearena were apparently re-injecting ads using WebRTC to bypass adblocking. So perhaps you are using an old blocklist such as this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt .

Thanks for the info. I found the raw blocklists on the router and the domain is in the 'disconnect' list, which I believe from a bit of reading is a tracker blocker list:

  Z:\adblock-temp\extracted\adb_list.disconnect (1 hit)
 Line 1367: com.phonearena
I did check the .json source files at the disconnect github page (about a month old) and the site is not listed. Beyond that I have better things to do with my Sunday!!

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#27

Post by kyleyeats »

squokko wrote: post #18

Hard to say from the article but I think the accusation is not that Facebook is deliberately running down batteries (why?) but that they are deliberately running tests in the background which run down batteries, eg. surreptitiously having a user's app run unnecessary image compression or decompression.

Yeah, a better word would be "knowingly" because the intent isn't to drain the battery. The guy's concerns aren't without merit, but it's a weird hill to die on.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#28

Post by nonrandomstring »

This angle remains interesting because of resonance with the early days of computer hacking law. The only tangible harm judges could convict on was "theft of electricity". Though we since have decades of cyberlaw on misuse and intrusion, this old concrete and measurable harm is still in the background, but rarely used. I think it should be used more creatively - with the added clout that squandering energy and "wear and tear" inflict a societal harm through climate effects and e-waste.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#29

Post by otherme123 »

foldr wrote: post #19
otherme123 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to test your app in negative scenarios, and one of them is "when and how to fail gracefully when battery is extremely low". My phone rarely goes below 10%, and maybe it has seen 5% one or two times. If Facebook waits for that, they will never run the tests. But if they detect my battery is at 10%, then drain it to 3%, launch the controlled failure testing, then drain the phone to complete shutdown, on the ne…

Or...buy some phones and run the tests yourself.

You could buy 100 iphones... Or you could "borrow" a million for free, to get rock solid stats.

Also there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different phone models. The allegedly used way of negative testing is much better than buying phones, and is virtually free.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#30

Post by kyleyeats »

seanhunter wrote: post #5
flemhans wrote: post #2

What 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…

None of the mentioned tests had anything to do with directly testing power drain or low-power performance. He just thinks they aren't giving enough weight to battery drain as an undesirable side effect of features that don't directly benefit the user. That's it. That's his whole gripe. They're testing how fast an image loads, that uses up the user's battery, and that's bad for the user.
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