Facebook accused of intentionally draining the battery of users’ smartphones

A former worker at the social networking site Facebook has alleged that Facebook and Messenger have the ability to intentionally drain the battery of their users’ smartphones. To do this, ‘negative tests’ are used. Through this process, tech companies can secretly drain the battery of a user’s phone to test an app’s features.

George Hayward, a former employee at Meta, the company that runs Facebook, has made this startling claim. George said that he had refused to take this test. He had told his manager that someone could be harmed by this. The manager’s response was that the company can help a large number of people by hurting a few. George was fired from the company. Following this, he has filed a case against Meta in Manhattan Federal Court in the US. He said that Facebook users risk not having access to their phones when they need it most.

Lauer, representing George, said: “It’s illegal and too bad someone could mess with my phone battery.” During his work at Meta, the company provided George with a training document on how to test negative. It was said in this that Meta has also conducted such tests in the past. Meta has not given any statement in this regard.

Late last year, Meta fired more than two dozen workers and contractors for taking bribes in exchange for giving hackers access to user accounts. Some of these workers had aided the hackers by accepting bribes of thousands of dollars. In a report published in the Wall Street Journal, some of these workers were said to have captured user accounts through the wrong means. Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has data on more than 3.7 billion users, and because of this, the company and its users have been targeted by hackers many times. Meta said last month that it was preparing to notify around a million Facebook users that their account details had been stolen through some apps.