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What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues

by mkl95 4y ago

What 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 ago
Exactly. 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 ago
  But 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 ago
  They 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)
hamasho 4y ago
Yeah, the boss didn't care about user's battery. From the article: I said to the manager, 'This can harm somebody,' and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses. Any data scientist worth his or her salt will know, Don’t hurt people,
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  > and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses. This is an AdTech business. They’re not curing cancer. How far up your own ass do you have to be to say that?
  - cpach 4y ago
    Facebook has great utility for billions of users. E.g. keeping in touch with family, friends, relatives, exchanging knowledge in Facebook groups etc. Of course it also has downsides. But I don’t believe it’s reasonable to dismiss the upsides of Facebook. PS. This does not excuse shitty behaviour of course.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
The problem is not one suffered by Facebook users, it's a problem suffered by people working at Facebook at the hands of evil management. Noble Facebook employees, fighting with their superiors, trying to do the right thing, whilst collecting a fat paycheck.
- mkl95 4y ago
  Middle managers are regular employees too.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones that tries loading an image that we don't show, just to get the metrics? Engineer A: Hmnn, that could work, we could load just one image across some small % of the user base to get a representative sample and report that data to system X so we can get some statistics and make heuristics based off of that. Ethics is not a strong suit/required reading for software engineers, so not every engineer will read the above and detect something wrong. Hell, running experiments on wide swaths of users without consent isn't quite above board ethically either, but we've got a whole technological trees and industry dedicated to it. Most of the time the person with enough ethics knowledge to realize there's a problem here is more incentivized to alert legal (so they can add it to the EULA/ToS that users don't read) rather than stop the behavior. I suspect many engineers could read the conversation above and not think there was anything wrong there to begin with. And of course, once X teams across Y companies start using this, we've got a problem. Note that I use engineers for all the roles on purpose -- the idea that it's only non-engineers doing all the sketchy shit is a deflection of responsibility, I for one am pretty proud of George here -- he's turned down what is very likely a lot of money to do the right thing. We can only guess at how many do not take this route. [EDIT] I want to note that I do not put myself above this conversation -- being able to recognize that this is wrong immediately is not some innate skill that everyone has, it has to be reasoned about, and often where to draw the line comes down to widely-enough-held social mores/morality. For example, I run ethical ads on my personal blog -- I know that ads incur unnecessary load on user machines that visit, and in-turn burning unnecessary battery on visitors' machines. Am I the same as Facebooks' engineers that work on this system? Probably not, but explaining that completely (and convincing yourself or anyone else) is more complicated -- maybe it's only a matter of degree.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  But why not just limit such benchmarks to times when the phone is being charged? If they write internal guides on how to do this "thoughtfully" one would think they thought more about this.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
So they didn't explicitly ship a feature to drain users' batteries, they seem to have shipped a feature that does tests (testing how long downloading different image downloads take etc.) that drains a users batteries. It's not clear to me why they wouldn't run a few tests for a few seconds across many/all of their hundreds of millions of users so the battery drain would be unnoticeable, rather than enough on a single user where it would be noticeable.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  I read it as one of the tests being intentionally draining user's batteries, e.g. to see how important it is to optimize for battery ("we see X% lower engagement from users in the battery hungry category, so we should invest more in optimizing the app for that").
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
From the article, it sounds like this was part of A/B testing. They want to see how people behave when their battery doesn't last as long... so they drain the battery on 0.1% (or less) of user's phones to collect the data. Of course, if you ruin battery life for hundreds of thousands of users... you're likely to hit at least one user who really would have needed that battery.

by mkl95 4y ago

What 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 ago

Exactly. 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 ago
But 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 ago
They 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)

hamasho 4y ago

Yeah, the boss didn't care about user's battery. From the article: I said to the manager, 'This can harm somebody,' and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses. Any data scientist worth his or her salt will know, Don’t hurt people,

rpastuszak 4y ago
> and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses. This is an AdTech business. They’re not curing cancer. How far up your own ass do you have to be to say that?
- cpach 4y ago
  Facebook has great utility for billions of users. E.g. keeping in touch with family, friends, relatives, exchanging knowledge in Facebook groups etc. Of course it also has downsides. But I don’t believe it’s reasonable to dismiss the upsides of Facebook. PS. This does not excuse shitty behaviour of course.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

The problem is not one suffered by Facebook users, it's a problem suffered by people working at Facebook at the hands of evil management. Noble Facebook employees, fighting with their superiors, trying to do the right thing, whilst collecting a fat paycheck.

mkl95 4y ago
Middle managers are regular employees too.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones that tries loading an image that we don't show, just to get the metrics? Engineer A: Hmnn, that could work, we could load just one image across some small % of the user base to get a representative sample and report that data to system X so we can get some statistics and make heuristics based off of that. Ethics is not a strong suit/required reading for software engineers, so not every engineer will read the above and detect something wrong. Hell, running experiments on wide swaths of users without consent isn't quite above board ethically either, but we've got a whole technological trees and industry dedicated to it. Most of the time the person with enough ethics knowledge to realize there's a problem here is more incentivized to alert legal (so they can add it to the EULA/ToS that users don't read) rather than stop the behavior. I suspect many engineers could read the conversation above and not think there was anything wrong there to begin with. And of course, once X teams across Y companies start using this, we've got a problem. Note that I use engineers for all the roles on purpose -- the idea that it's only non-engineers doing all the sketchy shit is a deflection of responsibility, I for one am pretty proud of George here -- he's turned down what is very likely a lot of money to do the right thing. We can only guess at how many do not take this route. [EDIT] I want to note that I do not put myself above this conversation -- being able to recognize that this is wrong immediately is not some innate skill that everyone has, it has to be reasoned about, and often where to draw the line comes down to widely-enough-held social mores/morality. For example, I run ethical ads on my personal blog -- I know that ads incur unnecessary load on user machines that visit, and in-turn burning unnecessary battery on visitors' machines. Am I the same as Facebooks' engineers that work on this system? Probably not, but explaining that completely (and convincing yourself or anyone else) is more complicated -- maybe it's only a matter of degree.

alpaca128 4y ago
But why not just limit such benchmarks to times when the phone is being charged? If they write internal guides on how to do this "thoughtfully" one would think they thought more about this.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

So they didn't explicitly ship a feature to drain users' batteries, they seem to have shipped a feature that does tests (testing how long downloading different image downloads take etc.) that drains a users batteries. It's not clear to me why they wouldn't run a few tests for a few seconds across many/all of their hundreds of millions of users so the battery drain would be unnoticeable, rather than enough on a single user where it would be noticeable.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
I read it as one of the tests being intentionally draining user's batteries, e.g. to see how important it is to optimize for battery ("we see X% lower engagement from users in the battery hungry category, so we should invest more in optimizing the app for that").

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

From the article, it sounds like this was part of A/B testing. They want to see how people behave when their battery doesn't last as long... so they drain the battery on 0.1% (or less) of user's phones to collect the data. Of course, if you ruin battery life for hundreds of thousands of users... you're likely to hit at least one user who really would have needed that battery.