In reaction to the legal filing, the parent company of Facebook, Meta, stated that the “claims are without substance and we will strongly defend against them.”
A former employee has accused Meta of storing deleted Messenger data and sharing it with law enforcement.
Brennan Lawson, who worked for the social media corporation after leaving the United States Air Force, has filed a civil lawsuit saying that Facebook designed a method to access Messenger data that users believed to have been wiped.
Lawson, who is suing the corporation for retaliation against a whistleblower, claims he was sacked after raising questions about the legality of the tool.
Lawson started in a filing to the Superior Court of California in the County of San Mateo that he worked as a senior risk and response escalation specialist for Facebook’s parent company, Meta.
“The role required him to witness severe content, including beheadings, child rapes, and other cruel and savage displays of violence or obscenity,” according to the lawsuit.
Lawson asserts that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta failed to protect his mental health, which was negatively impacted by his exposure to this content. He seeks $3 million in compensation and punitive damages.
“Fired for blowing the whistle”
Lawson asserts that he attended a meeting in late 2018 at which “a Facebook manager offered a new tool to the escalation team.”
The petition asserts: “In contrast to past meetings, no materials were supplied in advance for attendees to peruse.
“This is because, unlike prior sessions, Facebook instructed staff on how to use a technology that allowed them to circumvent Facebook’s standard privacy safeguards and access user-deleted data.
“This back-end protocol enabled [Lawson’s] team to recover Messenger data that users had deleted. Facebook represented to its users that erased data was not stored locally and could not be retrieved after deletion. Not so.”
According to Lawson’s assertions, Facebook utilized this instrument to curry favor with law enforcement.
“Law enforcement would inquire about the suspect’s use of the platform, including whom they suspect was texting when messages were made, and even the contents of those communications,” according to the legal brief.
“To maintain Facebook’s good standing with the government, the Escalations Team would use the back-end procedure to provide responses to the law enforcement agency and then assess how much information to share.”
Lawson asserts that he spoke up at the meeting because he knew it violated Meta’s commitments to US regulators on user privacy and was illegal under EU and UK data protection regulations.
He claimed he then received a poor rating in his performance evaluation and then lost his job – ostensibly for improperly utilizing Facebook’s administrator tools to check on his grandmother’s hacked account – as retaliation for his whistleblowing.
Meta told: “These charges are baseless, and we will firmly defend ourselves against them.”
