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

It was late January, and Pinterest engineer Teddy Martin was on edge about recent layoffs at the company. Martin had just survived a round of cuts, but he and other employees were confused about who was being let go and why, and explanations from top executives including CEO Bill Ready had done little to quell the unease. So when Martin saw someone mention a tool that would shed light on the scope of the impact, he decided to share it in Slack.

The tool was a simple command known as ldapsearch — it aggregated a list of deactivated employee accounts from the directory, organized by office location, spitting out only the number of recently deactivated accounts next to the office location. A couple hours later, however, he noticed his post had been removed by a Slack administrator. “I didn’t receive any message that I had done anything wrong. I just noticed that it had been deleted,” he said. “And then the following morning at 11:29, I got an invitation to an urgent 15-minute meeting at 11:30.”

Martin was fired, and according to him, told he’d made “gross misuse of privileged access.” The HR representative told him that his health insurance would end at the end of the month — that was the next day. He began to worry about what that would mean for his family — he had a new house, a toddler, and a wife on medical leave to take care of.

Beside the immediate financial strain, Martin was confounded by how quickly and severely he was disciplined for sharing what at the time he felt was a useful piece of information. In comments to The Verge and other outlets, Pinterest has accused Martin of violating employees’ privacy without their consent. But Martin felt that Pinterest had provided little clarity and sometimes contradictions on its reasons for the layoffs, and thought the tool would help his coworkers “stress less, focus more.” His firing felt to him like a way to boot someone willing to question company decisions. Now Martin is “considering all his legal options,” according to his spokesperson, Douglas Farrar. And amid industry-wide conflicts between workers and tech companies, Pinterest is still pushing back.

Soon after Martin was fired, Ready held an all-hands meeting, and in audio leaked to CNBC, the CEO described “obstructionist” behavior — apparently talking about Martin’s actions — that the company wouldn’t tolerate. “After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly,” an unnamed Pinterest spokesperson told CNBC. The spokesperson said this violated Pinterest’s policy and employees’ privacy.

This explanation didn’t make sense to Martin. The ldapsearch command was not a custom script, and did not access any information that wasn’t already available to all employees, nor share the names of those impacted.

A current Pinterest employee, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said that even before seeing the command posted, they had also thought to run a similar one to understand what areas of the business were most impacted by the layoffs. “LDAP is like an IT-managed service that Pinterest provides. We have wiki articles all about how to use it,” the employee said. “If you ask our AI assistants, they will happily tell you all about how to use it. In my view, this was a known method, and I wouldn’t be surprised if half of engineering was already running this command prior to it being shared.” The employee said they’d seen the command shared in a couple different forms, but that the version Martin shared did not output names.

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

“We fully support our employees discussing layoffs with their colleagues and leaders. That is not in question,” Pinterest spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement to The Verge. “Mr. Martin’s actions undermined his laid-off colleagues’ privacy, disregarding Pinterest’s efforts to protect personal information they may not want shared. Many people don’t want others to know that they were let go, but Mr. Martin made that choice for them. Protecting our laid-off colleagues is the right thing to do. We stand behind that.”

While Martin maintained that the command he shared only produced aggregated numbers of deactivated employees by office location and did not share names, Choi said that the script “could be easily manipulated to pull the names of all impacted employees, simply by omitting the last line of the command,” and that another engineer demonstrated that after Martin’s initial post. Martin then “egged on others to misuse access to information and save data about the identities of laid-off colleagues before it expired – again in disregard to their colleagues’ privacy rights,” Choi said.

“Pinterest said two engineers wrote scripts to identify the names of laid-off employees, and fired Teddy on that basis,” Farrar, Martin’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “They’re now acknowledging his query didn’t do that. Those two statements can’t both be true.” He also called Pinterest’s accusations that Martin violated colleagues’ privacy “without merit and defamatory.”

Not everyone at Pinterest appreciated the command being shared. One former employee impacted by the layoffs, whose name The Verge agreed to withhold to protect their privacy, said they were “in shock” to learn about a tool being circulated that would reveal their layoff status. In a situation where they already felt a loss of control, it felt like another thing that “potentially could take away my autonomy to let people know.” They felt like employees who shared the command were “trolling the executive team” and like their own privacy was invaded.

Still, others were supportive of Martin and similarly grasping for more information, frustrated with management’s communication. The current employee told The Verge that while they found it “bold” of Martin to share the command, “I didn’t think it was necessarily wrong because I viewed that as kind of open information that people had access to. And I also felt that it was being shared out of a context of trying to help people understand what was going on.”

Screenshots from Blind, the anonymous forum for tech workers to share comments about their workplaces, show both sentiments represented. But in one poll on the app, nearly 200 respondents said that if they were laid off, they’d either want or not care if anyone at the company were able to find out that they were impacted. “At no point did Teddy share any personally identifiable information about his coworkers,” Farrar said in a statement. Pinterest’s decision to lay off the workers, he added, is the one “that will affect their future employment opportunities.”

The disagreement between Martin and Pinterest is just one example of the kinds of conflicts emerging between labor and management in Silicon Valley. Amid a challenging job market — in many cases driven by AI adoption or a focus on building out those capabilities, which Pinterest cited as a reason for the layoffs — workers are encountering an industry that appears to have tightened up its once infamously loose atmosphere, while some leaders have diverged from staff on major political and ethical issues. Martin said he wanted to go public in part to push back. “One article really got to me, which said, baseless or not, that Silicon Valley is looking at this event and wondering if Pinterest gets away with it, and if nothing happens and it just goes under the rug, then there will be a dissent-quelling wave across the industry,” he said. “And I can’t just let that happen without what I have available to me to try and stop it.”

This incident could raise questions for Pinterest under federal labor law if Martin or the other fired engineer choose to pursue a complaint. “Employees who use information that’s made available to them as part of a discussion amongst themselves about working conditions, including layoffs, they are protected by Section 7 of the labor law,” said Harvard labor law professor Ben Sachs. While the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), tasked with evaluating potential violations, would consider individual circumstances — such as how they accessed the information, if it was confidential, and what they did with it — Sachs said that “a fair reading of the statute would result in us concluding that employees don’t lose protection just because their discussion might lead to some people knowing who got laid off.” Even so, Sachs said, it’s “conceivable” the NLRB could reach a different conclusion under the frequently labor-hostile Trump administration.

Two elements of the Pinterest situation may make it a less clear-cut case than some others, according to Joshua Nadreau, an attorney at Fisher Phillips, which represents employers in labor matters but doesn’t work with Pinterest. One is delineating what’s acceptable when an employee accesses data that’s technically available to them, but shared in a way it wasn’t originally intended to be. The other is the need to understand the employees’ motivations. “If your motivation was to either reduce layoffs or improve visibility into how they were conducted, that could be mutual aid protection,” Nadreau said. “Versus, I was just curious if my friend in San Francisco had been laid off.”

Nadreau also noted that labor statutes far predate the digital age, and Democratic and Republican administrations have sometimes disagreed on whether employees should be allowed to organize over their company’s email or IT systems.

The current Pinterest employee who spoke to The Verge said a very similar command had been shared by another current employee on Slack earlier in the year. Because it was a few days between Ready’s email warning of layoffs and his all-hands, the employee said many people were already checking the number of active users on Slack or trying to figure out the state of layoffs however they could. “I never would’ve dreamed it would be a fireable offense,” they said. It effectively sent a message to the remaining employees: “Stay in line, don’t speak out or you’ll be terminated.”

Martin “had a reputation of asking open transparent questions,” the employee added. “To see him fired for something like that just kind of sent chills down my back and a lot of other people’s back, that this was not a place where transparency was welcome anymore.”

“I was the guy that asked hard questions,” Martin said. After he left his prior team within Pinterest to take on another role at the company, he learned that a former teammate volunteered to “be Teddy” at a meeting where no one else was asking anything. “I was the guy that was willing to say things that people were scared to say,” Martin said. “And I got fired because I wasn’t afraid enough.”