The former Facebook employee accuses the company of conducting secret background testing of applications without the consent of users, which depletes smartphone batteries, says New York Post.

This was claimed by the data processing specialist George Hayward, who has been fired for refusing to carry out the so-called “negative testing”, which allows the technology companies to “surreptitiously” run down someone’s mobile juice in the name of testing app features or looking for problem solutions.

“I said to the manager, ‘This can harm somebody,’ and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses,” says Hayward, who filed a lawsuit against Facebook in Manhattan Federal Court.

Personally, Hayward worked on the Facebook Messenger app, so around 1.3 billion users of this messenger are threatened with secret exhaustion of the battery.

Hayward does not know how many people have been affected by Facebook’s negative testing but believes that the company has long been engaged in this practice since he has received an internal training document titled, “How to run thoughtful negative tests,” which included examples of such experiments being carried out.

According to the lawsuit filed against the Facebook parent company, Meta Platforms, killing someone’s mobile phone battery puts people at risk, especially “in circumstances where they need to communicate with others, including but not limited to police or other rescue workers.”