What are your deleted internet posts like?
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 give them to law enforcement. If the former employee's claims are true, Meta's previous communications about how it handles user data could be questioned. The tool may be in violation of U.S. and EU privacy laws.
The former Meta employee claims he was hired by Facebook as a Senior Risk & Response Escalations Specialist. According to the complaint obtained by Gizmodo, he saw beheadings and child rape on a regular basis. His job was similar to that of Meta's army of underpaid and overburdened content reviewers.
According to the suit, a manager from Facebook briefed Lawson on a new tool which allowed them to circumvent Facebook's normal privacy protocols in order to access user-deleted data. According to the suit, the tool would allow the team to retrieve deleted data from Meta's Messenger app.
Messenger history could be accessed by a wide range of users, including children, according to an alleged protocol that went live around November of last year.
The claims in the suit were not confirmed by Gizmodo. Meta provided a statement about the alleged protocol and lawsuit, but didn't reply to the questions.
The claims are without merit and we will fight them vigorously. The attorney did not reply immediately.
The suit claims that the tools were created as a type of loophole to access data from Messenger without using Meta's standard back-end. Operators would use the tool to fulfill requests. Law enforcement officials would submit questions about a supposed suspect, which could include requests for information on who the potential suspect was messaging, and in some cases, even what the messages contained.
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