An old rumor is circulating again, mentioning that the Facebook and Facebook Messenger applications drain the battery of the cellphone that installs them. One former Facebook employee admitted this rumor is true.
Mentioned former Facebook employee George Hayward who is a data scientist, Facebook secretly drains the battery of its users' cellphones on purpose. As quoted from The New York Post, there is actually a name for this. Within Facebook, this activity is called 'negative testing'.
Negative testing allows the social networking giant to surreptitiously drain a user's phone battery to test features on an app or to see how images load. Hayward was fired by Facebook parent Meta for refusing to participate in negative testing.
"I said to the manager, this can harm someone. Then he (manager) said, 'By harming a few people, we can help the greater masses'. Every good data scientist knows, we shouldn't harm people," he said.
Hayward was fired by Meta in November 2023 and initially filed a lawsuit against the company in Manhattan Federal Court. The 33-year-old works for the Facebook Messenger Meta app which sends texts, phone calls and video calls between users.
In the suit, Hayward's attorney Dan Kaiser pointed out that draining a user's smartphone battery puts others at risk, especially "in circumstances where they need to communicate emergencyly with others, including with police or other rescue workers."
The lawsuit had to be withdrawn because Meta's terms of employment forced Hayward to argue his case in arbitration. Kaiser says that most people don't know that Facebook and other social media companies can deliberately drain batteries. Commenting on the practice of negative testing, the attorney added, "This is clearly illegal. The battery can be manipulated by anyone."
When he was first hired in 2019, Hayward received a six-figure annual salary from Meta. But when it came to the company's request to test negative, Hayward turned them down.
"I was not willing to do this test. It was illegal. And from then on, things didn't go well," he said.
At one point during his time at Meta, the company handed Hayward an internal training document entitled "How to run a discreet negative test." The document includes an example of how to run the test.
After reading the document, Hayward said he thought Facebook had used negative testing before. He added, "I've never seen a document more horrific than that in my entire career."