When you delete the messages you wrote on the Internet, are they really deleted? That question was brought up again this week, thanks to a new lawsuit filed by a Meta employee who alleges Facebook has created a “protocol” and developed a tool to find deleted posts from certain users and turn them over to law enforcement.
If this former employee’s claims are true, the app could also query Meta’s previous communications about how it accessed certain user data. The indictment also suggests that the tool may be in violation of certain US and EU privacy laws.
Former Meta employee and US Air Force veteran Brennan Lawson claims she was hired on Facebook’s Escalation team in 2018 as a Senior Risk and Response Escalation Specialist in Community Operations. Lawson says that while working as a moderator at Facebook, he regularly sees and deletes “wildly horrific content”, including beheadings and child rape.
The lawsuit builds on an allegation that, at an Escalation team meeting in 2018, a Facebook administrator briefed Lawson about a new tool to access user-deleted data that would allow Facebook to circumvent normal privacy protocols. Described as a “back-end protocol” in the lawsuit, the tool allegedly allows Lawson and his team to retrieve deleted data in Meta’s Messenger app.
This alleged protocol is said to go live around November 2018 and can be used to access Messenger history for a wide variety of users, including kids using the Messenger Kids app.
A Meta spokesperson said: “These allegations are baseless and we will defend ourselves vigorously against them.” Lawson’s attorney did not comment.
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