Fired Employee Claims Facebook Created Secret Tool to Read Users' Deleted Messages [View all]

[Nevilledog]

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https://gizmodo.com/facebook-meta-privacy-facebook-messenger-1849153040

How “forgotten” are your deleted internet posts anyway?

That question has come under renewed scrutiny this week thanks to a new lawsuit filed by a fired Meta employee who claims the company set up a “protocol” to pull up certain users’ deleted posts and hand them over to law enforcement. If the former employee’s claims ring true, the practice could call into question Meta’s previous communications about how it accesses certain user data. Going even further, the lawsuit alleges the tool may even violate certain U.S. and EU privacy laws.

Brennan Lawson, the former Meta employee and U.S. Air Force veteran, claims he was hired as a Senior Risk & Response Escalations Specialist in Community Operation on Facebook’s Escalation team back in 2018. According to the complaint obtained by Gizmodo, Lawson said his role regularly saw him view onslaughts of “wildly horrific content,” including beheadings and child rape. His job, similar to that of Meta’s army of underpaid and overworked content moderators, broadly involved determining whether certain posts should be removed.

During an Escalation team meeting in 2018, the suit claims a Facebook manager briefed Lawson on a new tool which, “allowed them to circumvent Facebook’s normal privacy protocols in order to access user-deleted data.” The tool, which the suit described as “back-end protocol” would allegedly let Lawson and his team retrieve deleted data in Meta’s Messenger app, data which was otherwise inaccessible.

That alleged protocol supposedly went live around November 2018 and could be used to access Messenger history for a wide range of users, including children using the Messenger Kids app.

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