Facebook apps can deliberately drain iPhone and Android batteries, says former employee

A data scientist formerly working for Meta says that Facebook apps can deliberately drain the batteries of both iPhones and Android smartphones, in order to examine the effect of low battery power on app performance …

Facebook apps can deliberately drain phone batteries

The report implies that the “feature” has been used on customer phones without their knowledge or permission, though stops short of categorically stating this.

The New York Post reports:

Facebook can secretly drain its users’ cellphone batteries, a former employee contends in a lawsuit.

The practice, known as “negative testing,” allows tech companies to “surreptitiously” run down someone’s mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image might load, according to data scientist George Hayward.

“I said to the manager, ‘This can harm somebody,’ and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses,” said Hayward, 33, who claims in a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit that he was fired in November for refusing to participate in negative testing.

Hayward said he refused because of the potential risk posed by draining someone’s battery when they might potentially need it for things like 911 calls, Crash Detection, and Fall Detection. He said that Facebook might even be unknowingly draining the batteries of phones belonging to police and rescue workers.

Hayward’s lawyer, Dan Kaiser, said that the practice was “clearly illegal.”

9to5Mac’s Take

File this one under “we need to know more.”

Clearly an app could be placed into a mode where it hammers the battery, and it seems entirely possible that Meta has built this capability into apps for testing purposes.

What seems harder to imagine is that the capability would be added to production apps, let alone tested on users without their knowledge.

Hayward himself says that he only “believes” the feature to have been used on customer phones based on an internal document that contained examples of these tests. Additionally, the report suggests that he was fired for refusing to do it himself, which again implies he was being asked to do it to unwitting customers – but stops short of actually stating this as fact.

We’ve reached out to Meta for comment, and will update with any response.

Via Macworld.