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Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

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

#81

Post by nmstoker »

bArray wrote: post #32
mkl95 wrote: post #12

What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.

Exactly. I found myself asking "but how would draining batteries help them?". I think lots of companies already do stuff like this, for example, Microsoft rolls out updates to smaller groups before doing larger deployments. Google Chrome tests some experimental features before a full deployment. It would be better if there was simply an opt-out of being part of this testing group. If the user goes to the effort of op…

They want to know how the app acts when a phone is in a low power state (because power profiles often kick in only then and that can meet to bad UX) Thus the intent seems to be: delivering put some users' phones into the state desired for tests (ie by draining their battery till they're at that level) and then commence the tests. In a lab it's all very clinical, but what if the test subject happens to be stalked at the time, desperately needs to make a phone call for help and then the device runs out of power at the critical point? That's obviously a made up, cherry picked example, but with large enough numbers you can expect that something like this would occur.

What's odd to me is that they don't seem to have been comfortable just getting test results from users whose phone battery state is at the desired level naturally (there's no major ethical issue where you, the tester, haven't caused the low battery provided you're not subsequently taking battery down to zero)

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

#82

Post by gggggg5 »

rightbyte wrote: post #51
hardwaresofton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…

Distributed unit testing ... as you note I like the idea. If a 'unit test' is "high CPU load during usage" they kill people though at their scale just by the fact that people can't call 911.

>they kill people though at their scale just by the fact that people can't call 911.

In the same way that everyone who drives a car is a murderer, a ridiculous appeal to emotion.

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

#83

Post by ajsnigrutin »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #39
mkl95 wrote: post #12

What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.

Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…

I would imagine a company the size of facebook can look at their internal stats, see what devices most people use, buy the top 80% of devices 10pieces each and create a lab environment to test them, and that includes battery usage.

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

#84

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

mkl95 wrote: post #12

What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.

From the article, it sounds like this was part of A/B testing. They want to see how people behave when their battery doesn't last as long... so they drain the battery on 0.1% (or less) of user's phones to collect the data.

Of course, if you ruin battery life for hundreds of thousands of users... you're likely to hit at least one user who really would have needed that battery.

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

#85

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #53
mkl95 wrote: post #12

What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.

So they didn't explicitly ship a feature to drain users' batteries, they seem to have shipped a feature that does tests (testing how long downloading different image downloads take etc.) that drains a users batteries. It's not clear to me why they wouldn't run a few tests for a few seconds across many/all of their hundreds of millions of users so the battery drain would be unnoticeable, rather than enough on a single…

I read it as one of the tests being intentionally draining user's batteries, e.g. to see how important it is to optimize for battery ("we see X% lower engagement from users in the battery hungry category, so we should invest more in optimizing the app for that").

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

#86

Post by md_ »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #39
mkl95 wrote: post #12

What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.

Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…

A potentially simpler explanation is an A/B test of a potentially CPU-intensive feature, and a misinformed data scientist.

Testing a higher-compression image format might effectively be testing relative behavior between an experiment arm with higher data usage and lower battery usage and an arm with lower data usage and higher battery usage. I.e., "testing draining users' batteries."

There are too little details in the blog post or the original article to really figure out what's being discussed.

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

#87

Post by ivan_gammel »

gggggg5 wrote: post #82
rightbyte wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed unit testing ... as you note I like the idea. If a 'unit test' is "high CPU load during usage" they kill people though at their scale just by the fact that people can't call 911.

>they kill people though at their scale just by the fact that people can't call 911. In the same way that everyone who drives a car is a murderer, a ridiculous appeal to emotion.

Better example would be a car manufacturer testing new production method that reduces safety of seat belts. Or aircraft manufacturer testing new software that compensates the significant changes in hardware design without airlines knowing about it. Though question is if it is really about seat belts or about diameter of cup holder in terms of safety.

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

#88

Post by gggggg5 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #87
gggggg5 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they kill people though at their scale just by the fact that people can't call 911. In the same way that everyone who drives a car is a murderer, a ridiculous appeal to emotion.

Better example would be a car manufacturer testing new production method that reduces safety of seat belts. Or aircraft manufacturer testing new software that compensates the significant changes in hardware design without airlines knowing about it. Though question is if it is really about seat belts or about diameter of cup holder in terms of safety.

No, neither of those are even remotely comparable.

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

#89

Post by ivan_gammel »

gggggg5 wrote: post #88
ivan_gammel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better example would be a car manufacturer testing new production method that reduces safety of seat belts. Or aircraft manufacturer testing new software that compensates the significant changes in hardware design without airlines knowing about it. Though question is if it is really about seat belts or about diameter of cup holder in terms of safety.

No, neither of those are even remotely comparable.

I have edited my post to be more relevant to the discussion, see the last part.

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

#90

Post by amelius »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #39
mkl95 wrote: post #12

What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.

Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…

My version:

Hey, Apple is now blocking our ads. They will eat our lunch. What can we do about it?

Hmm... Let's drain the batteries of iPhone users faster. They will switch to Android.

What if we get caught?

We'll just make up some story about A/B testing. Oh and drain some Android user's batteries too, for plausible deniability.

Great plan, implement it!

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