A former Facebook content controller says he was fired for raising the alarm over a company protocol allowing employees to restore user-deleted data.
Brennan Lawson, a former Facebook content controller, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against her former company. This Air Force veteran was hired into the team in July 2018, where he was to review posts involving graphic content such as murders and beheadings and moderate such posts.
In his complaint, he claims he was fired after questioning a “protocol” that allowed him and his team to recover deleted messages in messenger. Indeed, the ex-Meta employee alleges he was told about the new protocol during a staff meeting in 2019 and immediately questioned its legality. Shortly after, he claims to have been fired and remained unemployed for 18 months. He asks over $3 million in compensation, plus punitive damages.
Also read: Meta could pay a fine of 2.8 billion euros for spying on Facebook users
Your data never really disappears from Facebook
According to the complaint, members of Facebook’s Global Escalation team used the company’s new protocols and amended policy to recover data from the Messenger application that users had decided to delete. The team was therefore able to bypass normal Facebook privacy protocols in a way that platform users were unaware was possible.
The tool would have been used in particular to assist law enforcement with investigations of social media activity. « Law enforcement was asking questions about the suspect’s use of the platform, including who he was messaging, when the messages were being sent, and even their content Lawson says in his complaint. ” To keep Facebook in the good graces of the government, the team in charge used the protocol to provide answers to the law enforcement agency and then determined how much to share. Lawson added.
When the police asked Facebook for information, the social network therefore did not hesitate to reveal how a particular suspect used the platform and the contacts with whom he communicated, or the exact content of the messages received and sent.
Lawson obviously disagreed with his practices, and knew he was entering dangerous territory that could cost him his job by openly opposing this protocol. However, the former serviceman wanted to do his job with full transparency and if it meant being fired for doing the right thing, he was not afraid to take the risk of exposing these practices.
Facebook breaks EU rules again
This team was therefore able to circumvent Facebook’s normal privacy protocols which prohibit any form of restoration of deleted user data. Moreover, the protocol also seems violate EU digital privacy rules and a Federal Trade Commission order that required Facebook to specifically inform users of its data retention policies.
As you probably already know, Facebook is not an example in terms of privacy, since we know thatit collects your sensitive medical dataand is regularly condemned for spying on its users. Even worse, if you don’t know what happens to your personal data, neither does Facebook. The company seems a little overwhelmed by this mountain of information, and can’t quite figure out what she does with personal data of its approximately 3 billion users.
At this time, it’s unclear how many times Facebook has complied with law enforcement requests or what specific user data it has provided to them. Either way, Lawson’s claims make it clear that this information is data that many users thought was deleted and inaccessible, precisely because Facebook had publicly promised it. While waiting to learn more about this trial, you can go and check how to view your personal data on facebook.