Facebook, despite its huge popularity, has always been surrounded with controversies. From privacy risk to targeted ads, the social media platform has been accused of many things in the past. Another claim now comes from one of its former employees who claims that the app drains batteries of cellphones.

George Hayward, 33, a data scientist who worked for Facebook’s Messenger app, revealed a practise known as “negative testing” that allows tech companies to secretly drain a major portion of cellphone batteries in the name of running features or issues like how an image would upload or how fast the app runs, New York post reports.

Hayward claims that when he came to know about the negative testing feature, he discussed it with his manager who replied “by harming a few we can help the greater masses.” Hayward claims in his lawsuit that he was fired for saying no to negative testing practice.

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“I refused to do this test,” Hayward told the news company, adding, “It turns out if you tell your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ it doesn’t go over very well.”

Hayward who was hired in 2019 said that he does not know how many Facebook users have exactly been affected by this but is certain that the company practices negative testing. This is because he was given an internal training document titled, “How to run thoughtful negative tests,” which included examples of such trials runs conducted by the company.

“I have never seen a more horrible document in my career,” he said.

Facebook has long-been accused of secretly feeding on phones batteries. There have been news reports since 2015 that Facebook’s iOS app consumes large amount of phone’s battery even when the app is not open.

Inspired from the Android blogger Russell Holly in 2016, Redditor pbrandes_eth conducted a few tests with an LG G4 Android smartphone, to determine the effect of Facebook app on the device’s performance. They found that apps opened on the phone 15 per cent faster when Facebook and Messenger were not installed, compared to when they were.

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