A former Facebook content screener says he was fired for raising alarms about a new company protocol allowing employees to resurrect data that users deleted.<\/p>\n
Brennan Lawson sued Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook\u2019s parent, Tuesday in California claiming he was informed about the new protocol during a staff meeting in late 2018 and immediately questioned its legality. Soon after, he said he was fired and remained unemployed for 18 months.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s seeking more than $3 million in compensation plus punitive damages.<\/p>\n
The new protocol allowed members of the social network\u2019s Global Escalation Team \u201cto circumvent Facebook\u2019s normal privacy protocols\u201d by retrieving data from the Messenger app \u201cthat users had chosen to delete,\u201d according to Lawson\u2019s complaint.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Lawson said he realised he was on \u201cshaky ground\u201d for questioning the legality of the practice and fearful he\u2019d be fired if he pressed the issue.<\/p>\n
He was fired in July 2019, for allegedly improper use of a Facebook administrative tool. He claims that was pretextual and an act of retaliation for his complaint.<\/p>\n
Facebook didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment sent after regular business hours.<\/p>\n
The Escalation Team used the protocol to help law enforcement agencies in investigations of users, Lawson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cLaw enforcement would ask questions about the suspect\u2019s use of the platform, such as who the suspect was messaging, when messages were sent, and even what those messages contained,\u201d Lawson claimed.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
A former Facebook content screener says he was fired for raising alarms about a new company protocol allowing employees to resurrect data that users deleted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":440732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[20473,161,8887,40812],"class_list":["post-451632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-data-privacy","tag-facebook","tag-facebook-messenger","tag-meta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451632"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}