An Air Force vet who worked at Facebook is suing the company saying it accessed deleted user data and shared it with law enforcement

• A former member of Facebook's escalations team is suing the company.
• His lawsuit accuses Facebook of introducing a tool in 2019 to let staff access deleted Messenger data.

A former Facebook staffer and Air Force veteran is suing Meta saying he was fired in retaliation for raising concerns about a protocol that let Facebook employees access deleted user data.

Brennan Lawson filed his lawsuit with a California court on Tuesday. Insider has viewed the lawsuit, in which Lawson said he was hired in July 2018 to work on Facebook's escalations team.

His work was similar to Facebook's army of content moderators, viewing graphic content including beheadings and child sexual assault.

The material viewed by Lawson and his team was particularly high-profile according to the lawsuit, having been flagged to Facebook by journalists, law enforcement, and governments.

Lawson says in 2019 Facebook introduced a protocol which allowed people on his team to access Facebook Messenger data even if it had been deleted by a user.

This is at odds with what Facebook told users, per the lawsuit. "Facebook had represented to users for years that once content was deleted by its users, it would not remain on any Facebook servers and would be permanently removed," Lawson's lawsuit states.

The lawsuit says the protocol was used to access user data when law enforcement requested data about a suspect.

"To 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," the lawsuit says.

Lawson says Facebook retaliated against him after he questioned the legality of this protocol in a meeting, and that it used a pretext involving his grandmother's hacked Facebook account to fire him.

Lawson's grandmother contacted him in 2019 to say her Facebook account had been hacked.

Lawson says he directed her case through the appropriate channels to restore her account, but Facebook fired him claiming he had not followed company protocol by typing his grandmother's email address into an admin tool, the lawsuit says.

Meta did not immediately respond when contacted by Insider about the lawsuit. Lawson's attorney did not immediately respond when contacted outside of usual US working hours.