Pinterest said he violated the privacy of his laid-off colleagues. Now he’s going public

It was late January, and Pinterest engineer Teddy Martin was on edge about the company’s recent layoffs. Martin had just survived a round of cuts, but he and other employees were confused about who would be let go and why, and explanations from senior executives including CEO Bill Reidy did little to allay anxiety. So when Martin saw someone mention a tool that would highlight the scope of influence, he decided to share it on Slack.

The tool was a simple command known as ldapsearch, which compiled a list of disabled employee accounts from the directory, sorted by office location, identifying only the number of recently disabled accounts next to the office location. However, after a few hours, he noticed that his post had been removed by a Slack admin. “I didn’t receive any message saying I did anything wrong. I just noticed it was deleted,” he said. “Then the next morning at 11:29, I received a call for an urgent 15-minute meeting at 11:30.”

Martin was fired and, according to him, was told that he had committed a “gross abuse of access privileges.” The HR representative told him his health insurance would expire at the end of the month, which was the next day. He began to worry about what this would mean for his family, now that he had a new home, a young child, and a wife on medical leave to care for.

Beyond the immediate financial pressures, Martin was bewildered by how quickly and severely he was disciplined for sharing what he felt at the time was useful information. In the comments on Edge And other outlets, Pinterest accused Martin of violating employees’ privacy without their consent. But Martin felt Pinterest offered little clarity and sometimes inconsistencies about the reasons for layoffs, and he thought the tool would help his coworkers “de-stress and focus more.” It seemed to him that firing him was a way to fire someone who wanted to question the company’s decisions. Now Martin is “considering all of his legal options,” according to his spokesman, Douglas Farrar. Amid industry-wide struggles between workers and tech companies, Pinterest is still fighting back.

Shortly after Martin was fired, Reidy held an audio and full meeting leaked into CNBCthe CEO described “obstructive” behavior — apparently speaking of Martin’s actions — that the company would not tolerate. An unnamed Pinterest spokesperson said: “After we were clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying affected employees, two engineers wrote custom scripts to improperly access confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all terminated employees and then shared it more broadly.” CNBC. The spokesperson said this violates Pinterest policy and employee privacy.

This explanation didn’t make sense to Martin. The ldapsearch command was not a custom script, did not access any information that was not already available to all employees, and did not share the names of those affected.

One current Pinterest employee, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said that even before seeing the order published, they had also considered running a similar order to understand which areas of the business were most affected by layoffs. “LDAP is like an IT-managed service that Pinterest provides,” the employee said. “We have wikis on how to use it.” “If you ask our AI assistants, they will happily tell you all about how to use it. From my perspective, this was a known method, and I wouldn’t be surprised if half the engineers were already running this before sharing it.” The employee said they saw the order shared in several different forms, but the version Martin shared did not bring out the names.

CNBC She updated her story to note that several Pinterest employees had contacted the outlet to dispute the company’s account after the publication.

“We fully support our employees discussing layoffs with their colleagues and leaders. This is not in question,” Pinterest spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement. Edge. “Mr. Martin’s actions undermined the privacy of his laid-off colleagues, ignoring Pinterest’s efforts to protect personal information they may not want to share. Many people don’t want others to know they’ve been let go, but Mr. Martin made that choice on their behalf. Protecting our laid-off colleagues is the right thing to do. And we support that.”

While Martin maintained that the order he shared only produced aggregated numbers of disabled employees by office location and did not share names, Choi said that the text “could be easily manipulated to pull the names of all affected employees, simply by deleting the last line of the order,” and that another engineer demonstrated this after Martin’s initial post. Martin then “urged others to abuse access to information and save data regarding the identities of laid-off colleagues before it expired – again in disregard of their colleagues’ privacy rights,” Choi said.

“Pinterest said two engineers wrote scripts to identify the names of the laid-off employees, and they fired Teddy on that basis,” Farrar, Martin’s spokesman, said in a statement. “They now admit that his inquiry did not do that. Neither of these statements can be true.” He also called Pinterest’s accusations that Martin violated his colleagues’ privacy “baseless and defamatory.”

Not everyone on Pinterest appreciated what was being shared. One former employee affected by the layoffs, his name is Edge They agreed to stay away from work to protect their privacy, and said they were “in shock” when they learned of a tool being circulated that would reveal their layoff status. In a situation where they already felt a loss of control, it seemed like one more thing that would “potentially take away my autonomy to inform people.” They felt like the employees who shared were “trolling the executive team” and that their privacy had been violated.

However, there were others who supported Martin and were similarly eager for more information and were frustrated with the administration’s outreach. The current employee said Edge Although they found it “audacious” for Martin to share, “I didn’t think it was necessarily wrong because I saw it as kind of open information that people could access. I also felt like it was being shared outside the context of trying to help people understand what was going on.”

Screenshots from Blind, the anonymous forum for tech workers to share feedback about their workplace, show both sentiments. But in one poll on the app, nearly 200 participants said that if they were laid off, they either wanted to or didn’t care if anyone at the company could know they were affected. “At no time did Teddy share any personally identifiable information about his coworkers,” Farrar said in a statement. He added that Pinterest’s decision to lay off workers is one that “will impact their future employment opportunities.”

The dispute between Martin and Pinterest is just one example of the types of conflicts emerging between workers and management in Silicon Valley. Middle A Challenging job market – In many cases this is driven by the adoption of AI or a focus on building those capabilities Cite Pinterest As a reason for layoffs – workers face an industry that appears to have tightened its once-infamous loose atmosphere, while some leaders have disagreed with employees over… Major political and moral issues. Martin said he wanted to appear publicly in part to fight back. “One article caught my attention that said, whether unfounded or not, Silicon Valley is looking at this event and wondering if Pinterest is going to get away with it, and if nothing happens and the matter is swept under the rug, there will be a crackdown on opposition across the industry,” he said. “And I can’t let that happen without my chance to try to stop it.”

This incident could raise questions for Pinterest under federal labor law if Martin or the other fired engineer chooses to pursue a complaint. “Employees who use information available to them as part of a discussion among themselves about working conditions, including layoffs, are protected under Section 7 of the Labor Code,” said Ben Sacks, a professor of labor law at Harvard University. While the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), charged with evaluating potential violations, will take into account individual circumstances — such as how they accessed the information, whether it was confidential, and what they did with it — Sachs said that “a fair reading of the law would lead to the conclusion that employees do not lose protection simply because their discussion might lead to some people knowing who was laid off.” However, Sachs said, it is “conceivable” that the NLRB would reach a different conclusion under the law. repeatedly Anti-labour Trump administration.

There are two elements in the Pinterest case that may make it a less straightforward case than some others, according to Joshua Nadro, an attorney at Fisher Phillips, which represents employers in labor matters but does not work with Pinterest. One is to define what is acceptable when an employee accesses data that is technically available to them, but is shared in a way that it was not originally intended to be. The other is the need to understand employees’ motivations. “If your motivation is to reduce layoffs or improve visibility on how to do them, that could be mutual aid protection,” Nadro said. “On the other hand, I was just curious to know if my friend in San Francisco had been laid off from his job.”

Nadro also noted that labor laws far predate the digital age, and Democratic and Republican administrations have sometimes disagreed over whether employees should be allowed to regulate via their company email or IT systems.

The current Pinterest employee he spoke to Edge He said something very similar was shared by another current employee on Slack earlier in the year. Since it had been a few days between Ready’s email warning about the layoffs and his hands, the employee said many people were already checking the number of active users on Slack or trying to find out the status of the layoffs any way they could. “I never dreamed it would be a fireable crime,” they said. It effectively sent a message to the remaining employees: “Stay in line, don’t talk or you will be terminated.”

The employee added that Martin “was known for asking open and transparent questions.” “Seeing him get fired for something like this sent shivers down my back and a lot of other people’s backs, and this is not a place where transparency is welcomed anymore.”

“I was the guy who asked the tough questions,” Martin said. After leaving his previous team within Pinterest to take on another role at the company, he learned that one of his former teammates had volunteered to be “Teddy” in a meeting where no one else was asking anything. “I was the guy who was willing to say things people were afraid to say,” Martin said. “And I got kicked out because I wasn’t scared enough.”