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Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
- flemhans 4y agoWhat testing?
- seanhunter 4y agoThe claim in TFA is they run a/b style tests where a sample group would have their battery deliberately drained to test performance of the app in low-power situations. Based on the general fixation on tests at Meta and Alphabet et al, it seems pretty plausible to me that they might try such a thing although: 1) the article is just the employee's claims in the context of employment arbitration, rather than evidence. For example they claim to have been shown a document about running such tests, but it's not clear whether that document has been entered into evidence (and certainly not made public). That document would presumably be subject to discovery in a lawsuit, although in arbitration it's unlikely it would be in the public record unless someone with standing made a freedom of information request (which may or may not reveal it). 2) It seems to me such a test would be unnecessary regardless of the ethics of it. You could just look at instances when a user's battery was low organically without draining it on purpose. The installed base is large enough that this would almost certainly work just as well for most practical purposes.
- a1studmuffin 4y agoPlus 2) would require additional design, engineering and QA work to implement the code to drain users' batteries. And it would cause plenty of users to uninstall/complain if Messenger was draining huge amounts of battery. It really doesn't make sense considering Messenger has 1.3 billion users, and remaining battery percent would likely be a bell curve across all users regardless of sample size.
- womitt 4y agoExactly, why don't just wait, this would make no sense from a risk rewards perspective
- otherme123 4y agoYou want to test your app in negative scenarios, and one of them is "when and how to fail gracefully when battery is extremely low". My phone rarely goes below 10%, and maybe it has seen 5% one or two times. If Facebook waits for that, they will never run the tests. But if they detect my battery is at 10%, then drain it to 3%, launch the controlled failure testing, then drain the phone to complete shutdown, on the next boot they have their very valuable data.
- foldr 4y agoOr...buy some phones and run the tests yourself.
- otherme123 4y agoYou could buy 100 iphones... Or you could "borrow" a million for free, to get rock solid stats. Also there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different phone models. The allegedly used way of negative testing is much better than buying phones, and is virtually free.
- foldr 4y agoI think Facebook Can afford to buy thousands of different phone models (and presumably already does?) Handling low battery states isn’t exactly rocket science anyway. Do less computation. The rest is up to the OS.
- pawelmurias 4y ago"Borrowing" a million phones and draining their battery down would make increase the perception of your app draining batteries. Seems pretty dubious if you would be willing to do that just to get a bit better low battery prices.
- kyleyeats 4y agoNone of the mentioned tests had anything to do with directly testing power drain or low-power performance. He just thinks they aren't giving enough weight to battery drain as an undesirable side effect of features that don't directly benefit the user. That's it. That's his whole gripe. They're testing how fast an image loads, that uses up the user's battery, and that's bad for the user.
- seanhunter 4y agoTFA literally says the battery drain was the purpose, not a side-effect: If you believe former Facebook employee George Hayward, a data scientist, Facebook can secretly drain the battery on its users' cellphones on purpose.
- kyleyeats 4y agoOkay, but the "you" in this sentence doesn't transfer to other readers. It's you when you read it, but when I read it, it's me. And I don't believe him.
- cma 4y ago> That document would presumably be subject to discovery in a lawsuit, although in arbitration it's unlikely it would be in the public record unless someone with standing made a freedom of information request (which may or may not reveal it). Facebook doesn't retain documents for any significant period of time to the point where they lobotomize their own memory to avoid stuff like this in lawsuits (and to reduce costs of discovery).
- Shish2k 4y agoFor a random subset of users, when they view one image, the app downloads two images (eg webp and jpeg) and makes a note of which one decodes fastest; the goal being that in the future they can just download the fastest-decoding one, saving CPU load (and thus battery usage) for everybody in the future. The argument is that downloading two images when you only need one is “deliberately wasting battery”.
- dijit 4y agoAnnoyingly easy to discredit this article as a disgruntled former-employee trying to stick it to Facebook/Meta. I'm no fan of Facebook, seriously. But it's hard to take an article like this at face value. Was he fired for not doing his job, and his grievance was a reframed legitimate problem (IE doing data analysis in the background will run down the battery)? Was he just laid off during this most recent round of layoffs and is reframing it as an injustice for him fighting for users? We only have his word, and there only needs to be a hint of truth to make it easy to digest. See also: It's hard not to know what you're getting into with Facebook, especially in the role this person took. Data analysis is the name of the game.
- ed_elliott_asc 4y agoThe article says he was fired for not running the test and reporting to his manager that it was wrong
- ilyt 4y agoI don't think someone would risk being attached the "faking the reason for firing" label and become harder to employ and fake stuff like that then go public with it. I mean sure it is possible, but lying about stuff like that is on stupid end of spectrum
- themitigating 4y agoI also don't think people do stupid things when angry
- throwaway69123 4y agoWhat is the point this comment is trying to make ?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dijit 4y agoI find it hard, despite hating Facebook, to believe the article with the lack of evidence and how easy it would be to explain the symptoms described as part of another (less intentionally malicious) operation.
- stinos 4y agoI can't shake the feeling of how 'double' this is. One one hand, yes this is like criminal behavior. On the other hand: the difference in battery drain rate between a phone running stock Android vs the same phone running for instance LineageOS for MicroG is also pretty big whereas for the user-facing functionality it can do the exact same thing. In other words: in my view if you get a smartphone these days you are in fact already buying into a device which can save your life, but needs to maintain a charge to do that. And on which the vendor is essentially already doing as they please, and not to your benefit, since you agreed with that somehow, and all of that drains of course battery. This particular operation is just one of many. Just somewhat more direct. (shouldn't this link to the original article (https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refused-to-do-negative-testing-awsuit/ https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refu...) instead of what looks like almost a complete copy-paste?)
- Phiwise_ 4y agoAgreed. As much as it's noble to say technology companies (especially the successful ones) should care more about their users/customers, these sorts of conversations can really get off into the trolly-problem weeds of ethicizing generic tools, and generic entertainment tools going by what users spend most of their time on. At some point we, the public, have to take responsibility for our own security (or whatever else as the specific case may be) by coming up with a plan slightly more sophisticated than "Hope my angry birds machine is up to the task of literally saving my life". It feels like back in the bad old days before smartphones, every suburban dad in cargo shorts understood that if he wanted to make sure he could call into work, he had to bring an extra battery along and not waste juice on superfluous calls, and preferred separate pocket computers for time-wasting entertainment or non-critical business applications. Nowadays we've integrated the two together for convenience, but still get this outrage cropping up every so often over not matching the reliability of the older machines that were designed to primarily just be reliable. Something had to give to, erm, give us our angry birds, and customers bought giving up reliability in emergencies for convenience in the 99.9% of time that's not an emergency. Not preparing for the off chance that the computer in your pocket will prioritize something other than utility-level uptime for call-making by carrying a second phone or extra power, regardless of who, what, or how, is a naive failure to plan that needs to be addressed more deeply than whatever nonsense Facebook's up to this month. Which doesn't have to be a problem, so long as we're not pretending things are different. Users are perfectly capable of running their battery down all on their own, or installing software (or as you point out THE OPERATING SYSTEM) that runs the battery down all on its own "naturally" because everyone involved has different wants until after they've actually had a heart attack at 2% battery.
- tommek4077 4y agoI miss the part that explains WHY they would drain a battery. What kind of outcome has this test?
- darren_ 4y agoi don't find it too compelling, but this test could potentially help you understand, to some degree, how important battery consumption of an app actually is to users. so you run a test where you intentionally consume more of some cohort of users' battery power (you could have several cohorts where you consume more and more power, even). and you look to see if the rate at which your app is deleted/force-quit by the cohorts with more power usage goes up. if it does then you can assume that you're overdoing the battery drain. if it doesn't then you can assume users don't really care (or don't care enough; maybe they're unhappy but your app is too important to them to delete). why this could be useful is when you're deciding what to prioritize - if you've got data saying that users don't care about excessive battery consumption and they'll keep using the app anyway, you can argue against optimizing for battery life in future development, presumably letting your developers do things faster/more lazily. or, it could show that battery life is super important and be a valuable argument to prioritize power optimization work in the name of keeping your users from jumping ship. personally i'd rather just presume that battery life is important and that optimizing for efficient use of our users' batteries is the right thing to do, regardless of hard data, but i'm sure there are people out there that think differently.
- relix 4y agohard to make that study work, it presupposes that users (a) understand that their battery life is decreasing and (b) understand that this application is responsible for it (and to what degree). Those are two big if's, it's more likely they'll chalk it up to battery aging than to a malicious application that used to be well-behaved. That doesn't however prove that users don't care - it only takes one article with a headline "Phone draining quickly? Facebook battery usage has increased by XX% the past year and responsible for majority of its users battery drain" to completely swing the pendulum to the other side where more users are deleting your app because of this new reputation, than would proportional to the actual battery drain; but without that trigger the study is not complete.
- mkl95 4y agoWhat 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.
- bArray 4y agoExactly. 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 opting out, then they likely have a good reason for this. Also maybe Facebook also doesn't want to run this on devices with already bad battery performance for example.
- bjornsing 4y agoBut why would you call something like that "negative testing"? Maybe I'm being too cynical, but my interpretation was that they wanted to know e.g. how many would uninstall the app if it consumed more power. Would make business sense to test this, and would be logical to call it "negative testing": do something negative to the user and see if they react.
- nmstoker 4y agoThey 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)
- linker3000 4y agoI couldn't get to phonearena.com, and when I checked it's in one of the default lists used by Adblocker on OpenWrt (adaway, adguard, disconnect, yoyo): ::: ::: domain 'phonearena.com' in active blocklist ::: + phonearena.com Any thoughts!!? Edit: Is there a good site or script to run through the Adblock lists, check them and report the location of matches?
- Lanrei 4y agoThe only thing that I could find was from 2017, where phonearena were apparently re-injecting ads using WebRTC to bypass adblocking. So perhaps you are using an old blocklist such as this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt.
- linker3000 4y agoThanks for the info. I found the raw blocklists on the router and the domain is in the 'disconnect' list, which I believe from a bit of reading is a tracker blocker list: Z:\adblock-temp\extracted\adb_list.disconnect (1 hit) Line 1367: com.phonearena I did check the .json source files at the disconnect github page (about a month old) and the site is not listed. Beyond that I have better things to do with my Sunday!!
- squokko 4y agoHard to say from the article but I think the accusation is not that Facebook is deliberately running down batteries (why?) but that they are deliberately running tests in the background which run down batteries, eg. surreptitiously having a user's app run unnecessary image compression or decompression.
- kyleyeats 4y agoYeah, a better word would be "knowingly" because the intent isn't to drain the battery. The guy's concerns aren't without merit, but it's a weird hill to die on.
- softwaredoug 4y agoWhatever the ethics of this, the intention seems to be to learn what drains batteries less.
- psychphysic 4y agoI'm gonna need this explained cause I can't make heads or tails of it. So companies make apps behaviour poorly for a subset of users. In this case run down a battery. Why? It seems he refuses to roll that out, but Facebook seems to have guidelines about how to do it? This seems bonkers. Is the idea to find out how far you can go before someone uninstalls? Or what?
- Haga 4y agoBasically, your phone is picked as a test phone, were software tests run in the background. That's how I understand it.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoThis angle remains interesting because of resonance with the early days of computer hacking law. The only tangible harm judges could convict on was "theft of electricity". Though we since have decades of cyberlaw on misuse and intrusion, this old concrete and measurable harm is still in the background, but rarely used. I think it should be used more creatively - with the added clout that squandering energy and "wear and tear" inflict a societal harm through climate effects and e-waste.
- throwawaybutwhy 4y agoSo many comments doubting the validity of the claim. Kinda fishy, but the touchstone is simple: - Does Facebook have an IRB? - How are experiments documented and vetted? We did not know about Plutonium Files, either (for the record, these were the experiments where plutonium and other radioactive compounds were injected into pregnant women, prisoners, mentally disabled children etc etc).
- kristiandupont 4y agoThis article is very hard to follow! I get that there was a lawsuit and the ex employee said that they what they were doing might harm people. But what were they actually doing? Draining the battery on purpose for some reason? Or was it just an unfortunate side effect of something?
- brabarossa 4y ago>But what were they actually doing? I'm assuming the opposite of battery optimizations. Some developers prefer functionality over battery life: https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/
- willyt 4y agoAnecdata: I pretty much never go on Facebook anymore and now my phone battery comfortably lasts all day. The current worst app on my phone is Duolingo, it guzzles 15% in about 15 mins and makes the phone noticeably hot. The most impressive app is Apple Music which feels like it should use a lot of battery but doesn’t.
- scarface74 4y agoWhy would a music app use a lot of battery? Apple has been optimizing its hardware for over 20 years to play media efficiently.
- macintux 4y agoI bought the first iPad, and one road trip I drove a couple of hours playing music (whether via wired output or from its speakers I don't recall). I was pleasantly surprised to discover on arrival that I still had 100% battery life.
- willyt 4y agoBoth apple music and Duolingo are basically just downloading sound files from the internet and playing them. One can do it all day and barely drop 10% battery. The other would drain your phone in an hour. OK Duolingo sometimes does some speech recognition but I bet that’s done server side and it’s downloading/uploading way less data than Apple Music.
- epistemer 4y agoJust find a good Anki deck and get rid of Duolingo. To me, Duolingo is just a spaced repetition gateway drug to Anki.
- nickdothutton 4y agoI’ve read this short article carefully twice now and I still find myself trying to guess why Facebook would do this. I conclude it’s not a good article.
- stinos 4y agoWhy? Just like for other telemetry: all they have to do is push a small modification somewhere and they instantly get access to millions of data points which they can then use to analyse what works best for them. Though I agree it is very, very vague if the 'battery draining' is really just that or it's more a result of something like 'for _ in range(10000000): measurePerfOfAvsB()'. But I assume the original source did/could not enclose that.
- nickdothutton 4y agoI had assumed it was something like “we could cache this locally on the device, but then our telemetry would potentially be delayed, where if we always fetch live from the network then we get to see what they wanted immediately which is better for facebook for (insert reasons)”. The network fetch would be much more expensive in terms of battery life. Full disclosure: I have had to implement telemetry collection and have faced this kind of trade-off against power budget, but not for social media/personal/phone apps.
- gorgoiler 4y agoIt is surprising that this blogger, Friedman, did not or could not get a response from Meta. Even if it were a simple “a Meta spokesperson said that no such feature exists.” It would give a tiny bit of balance to an article that otherwise echos this fired employee’s complaint. Journalism 101. Edit: yeah this is blog spam. The New York Post article it links to has all the same details but with an extra line saying Meta did not respond. https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refused-to-do-negative-testing-awsuit/ https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refu...
- QuadmasterXLII 4y agoI mean, the nypost’s reputation is bad enough that you have to prove who copied who
- peterisza 4y agoThose who use apps instead of the websites deserve this. The apps literally just show the website
- scarface74 4y agoI’m far from a fan of any adTech company. But this article is sensationalist with nothing substantive.
- everdrive 4y agoAnother regular reminder: install as few apps as possible on your phone, and treat all apps in an adversarial manner. Every single app you install may come with multiple downsides (usually just tracking and advertising, but apparently also draining your battery during A/B testing.) and there must be clear and necessary benefits in order to justify the cost.
- pshirshov 4y agoThis is curious. I've recently migrated to Pixel 7 Pro with GrapheneOS and noticed that my battery was lasting for about 6 hours. And there was nothing unusual in the battery usage report. Initially I thought that something is wrong with new Pixels or GrapheneOS. So, I've started reading ADB logs and assumed that something might be wrong with Meta apps - (which I installed in work profile). The logs were full of various messages and stacktraces from their background services. So, I put them (facebook, messenger, whatsapp) into "restricted battery" mode and disabled background data. That was enough to keep battery for 12 hours. I thought that it might be an issue with Graphene sandbox and bad Meta code, not a deliberately created "feature". In the end I've also restricted Telegram and now my battery lasts for 17 hours. So, I went to the extremes and now I do the same (restricted battery + disabled background data) for all the apps by default.
- johnchristopher 4y ago> In the end I've also restricted Telegram and now my battery lasts for 17 hours. Do notifications for messages still work in restricted mode (sorry if silly question) ?
- pshirshov 4y agoYes. But there may be delays and sometimes when you tap on a notification nothing happens.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
- stefantalpalaru 4y ago[dead]
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoThe Facebook app has always been a battery hog; even on the best days. I use the Web site, which I think is intentionally broken for mobile users. I have not had it installed for years. I think I may still have the Messenger app, though. I need to make sure that's gone, too.
- linuxftw 4y agoI had the facebook app on my phone 10 or so years ago (maybe less). At first, everything was fine. Then after a while, my phone's performance ground to a halt. Eventually, I figured out it was the FB app and uninstalled it, and my phone was like new again. I buy budget level phones, so I was able to notice the performance impact, whereas a higher-end phone might not have. I mostly used the app for uploading pictures. Once I stopped using the app, FB started making the mobile site push you into using the app. That's around the time I stopped uploading pictures to facebook.
- shadowgovt 4y agoNot that I disbelieve the allegations, but the battery tracker on my phone consistently tells me that the largest consumer is Chrome, with Facebook Messenger somewhere way, way down the list. If they are bumping up battery consumption, either I've never been in the test group or they aren't bumping it enough to be a real risk.
- izacus 4y agoBut that's probably because you're actually using Chrome a lot? That tracker isn't very accurate and its very biased towards apps you're actually using (which makes sense doesn't it?).
- shadowgovt 4y agoIf Facebook's experiment isn't draining more battery than actual use, I'm not seeing the risk of harm.
- tonmoy 4y agoThe title is really click baity for sure
- vidanay 4y agoAnecdata at best: When I cancelled my FB and uninstalled the app (Android), my battery life at the end of the day rose by 10%-15%. Impossible to say if that was due to hidden app consumption or the fact that I was no longer doom-scrolling.
- nerde7788 4y agoFor the ab testing, I can think of testing whether having low battery would affect messaging to certain people(or if battery is low would they respond or how much time they are ready to spend if you combine with gps data it is even better)at given time and then ranging these people by importance for the user.