A former Facebook employee and US Air Force veteran is suing Meta, claiming he was fired in retaliation for raising concerns about a protocol that let Facebook staff access deleted user data.
Brennan Lawson filed the lawsuit in a California court on Tuesday. Insider reviewed the complaint, in which Lawson says he was hired in July 2018 to work on Facebook’s escalations team.
His job resembled that of Facebook’s army of content moderators, who review graphic content including beheadings and child sexual abuse.
According to the lawsuit, the material reviewed by Lawson and his team was especially high-profile, because it had been flagged to Facebook by journalists, law enforcement and governments.
Lawson says that in 2019 Facebook introduced a protocol that allowed people on his team to access Facebook Messenger data even after it had been deleted by the user.
According to the lawsuit, this contradicts what Facebook told its users.
“For years Facebook told users that once content was deleted by them, it would not remain on any Facebook servers and would be gone forever,” Lawson’s complaint states.
The lawsuit says the protocol was used to access user data when law enforcement requested information about a suspect.
“To keep Facebook in the government’s good graces, the escalations team would use a server protocol to respond to law enforcement and then decide how much data would be provided,” the complaint says.
Lawson says Facebook retaliated against him after he questioned the legality of the protocol at a meeting, and used a pretext involving his grandmother’s hacked Facebook account to fire him.
Lawson’s grandmother contacted him in 2019 to say her Facebook account had been hacked.
Lawson says he sent her case through the proper channels to recover her account, but Facebook fired him, claiming he had not followed company protocol by entering his grandmother’s email address into an administrator tool, according to the complaint.
Meta did not immediately respond when Insider contacted it about the lawsuit. Lawson’s lawyer did not immediately respond when contacted outside US business hours.
Based on an article in Business Insider
Read at the source (in Russian): Former Facebook employee sues Meta ⋆ DW