Last year, big tech companies laid off over 70,000 people worldwide. Workers at big tech companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Microsoft and Salesforce have been laid off in large numbers. Tesla, Netflix, Snap, and Spotify have also cut several jobs, but their layoffs are significantly fewer than larger companies. A former Meta employee has reportedly filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that Facebook is knowingly draining users’ phone batteries under the guise of testing features. The ex-worker has also claimed he was fired when he called the practice harmful and refused to take part.
According to a New York Post reportGeorge Hayward is a 33-year-old data scientist who claims to have worked at Facebook on its popular messenger chat application. In a lawsuit filed against the company, Hayward said he came across an internal training document titled “How to Perform Sophisticated Negative Tests,” which listed examples of experiments in which users’ batteries were covertly, but quite intentionally, under the The app’s guise of testing certain features have been deflated, according to the report. The practice, Hayward notes, is referred to as “negative testing.”
“I’ve never seen a more terrifying document in my career,” Hayward said, according to the report. “I said to the manager, ‘This can hurt someone,’ and she said by hurting a few, we can help the bigger crowds… I refused to take that test. Turns out, telling your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ doesn’t go over well,” he added. However, the report does not provide additional details of the document Hayward mentioned.
The former employee reportedly claims that he does not know the exact number of people affected by this practice, but believes that Facebook was involved in the activity due to the presence of the internal training module. According to the report, the lawsuit was filed against it Meta filed for indefinite damages in Manhattan Federal Court and has since been withdrawn because Hayward needed to go to arbitration, according to his attorney, who also stated that Hayward remains by his claims.
Draining someone’s cell phone battery puts people at risk, especially “in situations where they need to communicate with others, including but not limited to the police or other emergency services workers,” according to the lawsuit filed against Meta.
The report says Hayward was hired in October 2019 and fired last November, which he says was the result of his refusal to participate in “negative testing,” according to the report. It’s worth noting that Facebook’s parent, Meta quit more than 11,000 employees, or 13 percent of the workforce, this month in one of the biggest layoffs in the tech sector in recent years.
