The Facebook app is notorious for a lot of things, but over the past couple of years, users have made their peace with it. Yes, the app is known for getting access to your personal data and sharing it with the highest bidders. We all know how the app allegedly drinks away your device's batteries, but considering the sheer lack of 3rd party clients, we cannot do anything about it. A new report has surfaced, confirming the age-old suspicion about battery draining.
Facebook knows its killing your phone's battery, and it still continues to negative-test the app
George Hayward, a former employee and data scientist, has claimed that Facebook can potentially drain your phone battery secretly. All of this happens because of the platform's "negative testing" practices. If you are wondering what negative testing is, it serves as a form of software testing that introduces behaviors and circumstances to the app that are not normal at all to see how the software or the device on which the software is running behaves.
Upon talking to his manager about how harmful this could be, Hayward's manager responded by saying, "by harming a few, we can help the greater masses." After refusing to participate in this testing, Hayward was fired. Hayward even filed a lawsuit, which has been withdrawn as it required him to go to arbitration.
Hayward has also talked about how he was given an internal training document called "how to run thoughtful negative tests" the document also had examples of how you can run negative tests. Sadly, none of the examples were shared.
Facebook is not the one to run negative testing, to be honest. Almost everyone does it, from large-scale companies to individual users. For example, PC gamers push their hardware to unrealistic limits to test their stability.
This is an issue in the case of Facebook because deliberating killing phone batteries is not considered ethical. Hayward pointed out how this could jeopardize a person's life, especially when they were in an emergency and needed to contact someone. Not just that, these practices can also act as a catalyst for degrading the phone's overall battery life.
Whatever the case may be, there is little to nothing that users can do to stop Facebook and potentially other apps and platforms from doing the same, aside from completely stopping using the apps. Still, even that doesn't seem like a plausible thing to do. Let us know your thoughts on negative testing and whether you care about it in any way or not.
