little did this potterhead know that pages from his favourite book would leap out and merge into his own life when inspired by the wildly imaginative harry potter books 21yearold harvard student aran khanna decided to craft his own marauders map and revealed one of facebooks chamber of secrets back in may aran majoring in computer science and mathematics at harvard university was excited about walking in to intern with facebook i was initially very excited to be at fb in part because of the hacker culture they have where you are encouraged to move fast and break things and told that code wins arguments he told toi over an email chat from california well not always aran was tinkering around with facebooks messenger service something that he says had become an integral part of his digital life after he joined college it was the easiest way to keep in touch with old friends contact people i had just met organize impromptu poker games with people i hardly knew he explains that was until he realized that there was much data about him that the messenger was putting out almost every other message in my chats had a location attached to it and so i decided to have some fun with this data he built a chrome extension that could creepily map your friends hour by hour location from the fb messenger and he called it the marauders map as a reference to a magical map in the harry potter series which i grew up reading that allowed harry to track his friends every move as they went about school much like what the tool allowed me to do with my friends at harvard i built the tool as a side project primarily to show a consequence of a feature that had been around for years and publicly discussed before by cnet it frustrated me as an avid messenger user the app simply scrapes all the location data shared with you by your friends on facebook messenger and displays it on a map the same thing could be done with a piece of paper and a pencil my app just made it a bit easier he adds he says that his main goal was to share this with friends and family and see what they thought about the privacy consequences of this features predictably the road ahead wasnt easy within three days of aran writing the browser extension that was downloaded by over 85 000 people and shared on over 200 publications facebook got whiff of it it led to the withdrawal of his internship offer for making public a privacy flaw in their system much like the marauders had their map confiscated by argus filch the caretaker of hogwarts school aran had to deactivate the official version of his app at facebooks request i tried to tell them the reason behind what i did and why i felt rescinding the internship was a bit unfair and unexpected but by