fired employee now suing Meta

What’s happening? Former Facebook employee, Brennan Lawson, sued the social media giant’s parent company, Meta Platforms, in California on July 6, for allegedly unfairly terminating his employment, Bloomberg reported. As per the court filing, he says he was fired for raising concerns about an invasive tool that he claims allows Facebook to retrieve and access deleted messages.

Why was Lawson removed? According to Lawson’s suit, a company policy change introduced in 2018 gave Facebook’s Global Escalation team unrestricted access to users’ deleted messenger data. Lawson, who used to work as a content screener at Facebook, has questioned its legal basis since then. He claimed that he was on “shaky ground” after he began speaking out against the new protocol at meetings and feared losing his job because of it.

In 2019, Lawson was fired for “improper usage of a Facebook administrative tool,” referring to an instance when he used his credentials to help restore his grandmother’s Facebook account which had been hacked. However, he refuted these reasons, saying that it was merely a pretext, and that he was actually fired for speaking out against the protocol. He also claimed that the poor performance review he was given was “invalid” and part of the ploy to remove him.

Lawson said that he remained unemployed for 18 months, afterwards. Now with Tuesday’s suit, he is seeking $3 million in compensation and punitive damages.

Why does it matter? Big tech companies, especially Meta, are always saying that our personal data and messages are safe with them and that the companies do not have any access to our personal interactions on their platforms. However, we have seen these companies break these promises time and time again. We know that they are tracking every user movement on the platform. Usually, it takes whistleblowers to come up with the specifics of these violations, which is why it is important to document these statements instead of dismissing them as disgruntled employees.

What does the protocol do? The described tools were allegedly created as a type of loophole to access data from Messenger without using Meta’s standard back-end, which the suit claims would normally be prevented from accessing the deleted material. Essentially, the protocol allowed members of the social network’s Global Escalation Team “to circumvent Facebook’s normal privacy protocols” by retrieving data from the Messenger app “that users had chosen to delete,” according to Lawson’s complaint.

The Escalation Team used the protocol to help law enforcement agencies in investigations of users, Lawson said. “Law enforcement would ask questions about the suspect’s use of the platform, such as who the suspect was messaging, when messages were sent, and even what those messages contained. To keep Facebook in the good graces of the government, the Escalations Team would utilize the back-end protocol to provide answers for the law enforcement agency and then determine how much to share,” his suit added.

Is accessing deleted messages an offence? The protocol appeared to violate European Union digital privacy rules and a Federal Trade Commission order that required Facebook to accurately inform users about its data retention policies, according to the complaint. Lawson said that he had raised these issues as early as in 2018.

What has Meta said about the incident? Neither Mark Zuckerberg, himself, nor any other executive from Meta has so far not commented on the issue. However, a statement released by the company to tech news portal Gizmodo read, “These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves against them vigorously.”

How long does Facebook keep deleted data? Facebook accounts can take up to 90 days to fully be deleted, along with the information associated with it. However, the account will be inaccessible to other people using Facebook during that time.

Facebook accessing deleted messages is a three-year old question: Reports of Facebook accessing deleted information including messages and archived user account data (which contains photos, active sessions, chat history, IP addresses, facial recognition data and advertisement viewed by the user) came to light in 2018 during the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Reports by leading media organisations at the time had pointed towards Facebook being able to access their users’ data even if after their entire accounts have been deleted.

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