Former Meta employee under investigation for uploading 30,000 private photos of users

Theo Guardianan unidentified man currently living in London (UK), was investigated by the cybercrime unit of the Metropolitan Police Department for allegedly violating the privacy of Facebook users. This person is currently on bail, but will have to appear before the London Metropolitan Police Department in May, and notify the force if he leaves his residence.

Meanwhile, court documents released by AP gathered shows that this person allegedly accessed and downloaded about 30,000 private images belonging to Facebook users while working for Meta. “He created a piece of code designed to bypass Meta’s internal detection system to collect unauthorized image data,” the document reads.

Meta confirmed that the criminal investigation against the former employee is true. Mark Zuckerberg’s company said the problem occurred more than a year ago. “We immediately fired the individual, notified affected users, engaged an investigative agency, and enhanced our security measures,” a Meta spokesperson told Guardian.

Jon Baines, data protection expert at law firm Mishcon de Reya (UK), said that when an employee accesses personal data, such as customer images, without the permission of the employer (here, Meta), there is a possibility that the employee will commit a crime under data protection laws and computer abuse laws. In this case, Meta would not be liable because UK law does not punish organizations if their employees engage in “dishonest conduct”.

“However, if a court decides Meta does not have appropriate technical and organizational measures in place to protect customer data, they could be subject to significant fines, or claim damages under the law,” Baines explained.

Last month, Meta was hit with a class action lawsuit following a newspaper investigation The Swedish Daily (Sweden), which discovered employees at a Meta subcontractor in Kenya were reviewing videos from customers’ Meta AI glasses, including “sensitive” content such as nude photos, sex scenes and toilet scenes. Meta later explained that the face in the photo was blurred. However, sources say this action is not always effective. The information also prompted the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to open an investigation.

Theo Bloomberganother class action lawsuit was also filed in the District Court in San Francisco in January, alleging that a series of private WhatsApp chats were accessed, analyzed and stored by Meta employees. Zuckerberg’s company denied it later.

Meta’s “loose” data release comes as the company suffered a landmark defeat in court with Google last month, after being accused of failing to protect users from threats. On March 25, the Los Angeles High Court ruled that Meta and Google created a platform that harms young people, and must pay a total of 6 million USD to the victims. The victim, 20-year-old Kaley, said she was addicted to apps like Instagram since she was 9 years old and YouTube since she was 6 years old because of the “attention-grabbing design” of these platforms, which caused severe body image disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts due to “almost constant” use of the apps, and notifications that appeared so often that she “had difficulty stopping use”.

Theo Reutersthe ruling could set a precedent for thousands of similar lawsuits that may occur in the future in the US. CNBC called it “the social media industry’s tobacco lawsuit,” comparing it to tobacco companies in the 1990s that were forced to pay billions of dollars for lying to the public about the safety and potential harm of their products.