Fired Employee Claims Facebook Created Secret Tool to Read Users' Deleted Messages

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

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.

*snip*

[Oneironaut]

1. FYI - "Delete" on sites usually just means hiding something, not deleting it.

I wouldn’t trust Facebook, or any other company to actually delete something. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

[dalton99a]

2. Only idiots trust Zuckerberg

[FakeNoose]

3. Facebook makes snapshots (captures) and archives them

Facebook users are allowed to think they "control" their own pages and info. Users believe they can go in and delete text, video and photos from their own pages and from private messages.

However those things were already captured in an earlier snapshot and stored in Facebook's vault. The FB users don't get to control the vault. Heck they can't even access it, but Facebook can when they need to. Anybody that joined Facebook clicked on (and digitally signed) their EULA which gives Facebook permission to control their data.

I'm not connected with the management of Facebook and I'm not even a FB user any more, but even I know this.