This week, a former Facebook employee filed a lawsuit against the company accusing it of firing him for raising concerns that other Facebook employees could access deleted user data. According to the fired staffer, Facebook sometimes even provided this data to law enforcement officials when they requested info about a suspect.

The lawsuit claims that this kind of access directly contradicts what the social media giant tells its users. And according to the plaintiff, when he questioned the legality of this practice in a meeting, he was fired in retaliation.

“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,” the lawsuit says. “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.”

This is a pretty dramatic claim, and while it might prove difficult for the plaintiff to prove he was fired in direct retaliation for his remarks, it’s possible he has evidence of this data collection practice. And if he does, Facebook is sure to come under even more intense scrutiny soon.

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