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bilby2020 t1_j6fhg7v wrote

Reply to comment by nsfwtttt in Facebook secretly killed users batteries, worker claims in lawsuit by tyteen4a03

Right if you "test" in phones owned by your company in a test lab or at the best with employees who volunteer. No right with to test on the general population on their devices.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6guiwq wrote

That’s not how things work in real life.

Tests in “a lab” don’t represent reality, and every single company on earth expands testing to users to get real data.

That’s why new features are rolled out and not just appear for all users at once.

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bilby2020 t1_j6gwmfy wrote

Deliberately draining battery is a "feature"? I hope that in some countries, this will be treated as a malicious activity with possible investigation from authorities. How is this different from unauthorised use of computing resources.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6gyupw wrote

It’s not. This is exactly the problem with the article, it takes something that’s a normal procedure and makes it sound evil to people who don’t understand it.

In a “lab” I can test a change to my app on 30 devices maybe. 100 maybe if I have a bigger budget.

But still, with thousands of devices out there and an infinite amount of setups I can’t predict all the different ways a change to any piece of code can affect every single user.

As evil as Facebook are (and they are), they have ZERO interest in draining your battery. The opposite is true.

So when they create a new feature, or even make a change to something you don’t even notice about the app (I.e. the method in which images are loaded) - instead of releasing it to everyone - they release it to some… if the effect is negative, yes, these few users get fucked, but then the code is fixed, without fucking every single user.

So for example if Facebook finds a way to make images load faster, which is for the benefit of all users, one thing they need to do is make sure it doesn’t drain the battery too fast - because that would defeat the purpose.

They can’t just test it in the lab. They need to make sure it works well even if the device is on low battery mode, low/high brightness, with open apps in the background, and without, and so on and so on and so on for every single device.

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bilby2020 t1_j6h092k wrote

I am not sure. If they release a feature and that drains the battery by accident, then yes, they can be forgiven. In this case, it seems they knew it would drain the battery and still released the feature. Apple did similar wuth deliberately slowing down the OS and was fined. I hope the internal training document is revealed during the trial for us to know.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate#:~:text=The%20investigation%20concluded%20in%20November,about%20how%20it%20throttles%20performance.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6h154s wrote

It’s really unclear from the article since the contents of the document and the guide are not described (other than “horrible”), as well as the scale of the tests.

Most likely the document contains standard procedures.

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t0slink t1_j6hpttp wrote

You don't understand Batterygate either, probably because it's been so misreported on Reddit.

Batteries cannot consistently provide max voltage as they age. In order to prevent your phone from shutting down randomly - say, during a 911 call - they make the processor stay within the minimum voltage that the battery can provide.

Yes, it should have been an option, but most customers should leave this feature enabled anyways if they want a stable experience and a reliable phone.

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