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 allows 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 will never truly disappear 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 Going beyond normal Facebook privacy protocols in a way that platform users wouldn’t know 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 adds.
When the police asked Facebook for information, the social network therefore did not hesitate to reveal a particular suspicious comment 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 territory that was dangerous. could cost him his job by openly opposing this protocol. However, the former serviceman wanted to do his job with full transparency and if that meant being fired for doing the right thing, he wasn’t afraid to take the risk of reporting those practices.
Facebook breaks new European Union rules
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 respect for privacy, since it is known to collect your sensitive medical data, and is regularly condemned for spying on its users. Worse still, 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 often Facebook complied with law enforcement requests or what specific user data it provided to them. Either way, Lawson’s assertions clearly demonstrate 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 lawsuit, you can go and check how to consult your personal data on Facebook yourself.