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Harvard student loses Facebook internship after pointing out privacy flaws

• colanderman 11y ago
  It's hard to get too outraged about this. Imagine you go behind your current employer's back and release an exploit against one of their own products. Would you expect them not to fire you on the spot? The ethical course of action is to first use the internal communication channels afforded you as an employee to try to remedy the problem from within. Only if your employer refuses to fix the problem, is it ethical to whistleblow. Given that this kid already had an offer and a start date, he was literally only days away from having access to such communication channels, whereupon he would have been in a much better position to asses his employer's willingness to patch the security hole (which it seems they had already started doing). Instead he chose to throw egg in his (future) employer's face, and publicize a tool that could actually endanger people. I'm not at all denouncing whistleblowing… many whistleblowers are tantamount to martyrs. But publicly calling out your own employer without having assessed their awareness of the issue – and expecting them not to fire you – is just dumb.
  • animal531 11y ago
    I agree 100%. Nearly any employee/intern at any company would have landed in the same hot water.