Meta, the parent company of social media platform Facebook, filed a lawsuit against one of its former vice presidents, Dipinder Singh Khurana, over allegedly stolen confidential documents.
The legal challenge claims that Khurana, who is also known as T.S. Khurana, conducted a "stunning" betrayal when he defected to a "stealth" AI cloud computing startup. Khurana, prior to parting ways with the tech giant, had worked at Meta for more than a decade.
Meta Files Lawsuit Against Former Vice President
Throughout his tenure at the company, Khurana rose to a senior position as VP of infrastructure. However, he was later found to have violated his contract as he was preparing to leave by taking a "trove of proprietary, highly sensitive, confidential, and non-public documents about Meta's business and employees."
The accusation was revealed in a complaint that was filed on Feb. 29, 2024, in California state court in Contra Costa County. The tech giant alleges that Khurana uploaded documents related to employee salary and performance as well as non-public business contracts, to his personal Google Drive and Dropbox accounts just before he parted ways with Meta, according to Bloomberg.
Additionally, the tech giant said that at least eight of the employees whose information was included in the uploaded documents later left Meta to go work for Khurana's new company last year. The lawsuit noted that the former Meta vice president's conduct in leaving the company reflects an "utter disregard for his contractual and legal obligations."
In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta said that the company "takes this kind of egregious misconduct seriously." They added that the tech giant will continue to work to protect confidential business and employee information.
The situation comes as another former Meta employee, Jennifer Prenner, who was a marketing leader at the tech giant, joined EV giant Rivian as the firm's new vice president of marketing and CMO earlier this year.
Meta's Challenges
Prenner, who is based in Seattle, had most recently been a vice president at Meta and worked with the tech giant's Reality Labs business. After that, she took a year-long sabbatical. Prior to that, she worked as the head of marketing for Fire TV at Amazon and also spent nearly a decade with Verizon, said GeekWire.
In a LinkedIn post, Prenner said that she was excited by the mission and opportunity ahead as well as all of the amazing people that she had already met. Rivian, which was founded in 2009 and based in Irvine, California, raised billions of dollars in private funding from various companies, including Amazon and Ford, before going public in 2021.
The latest lawsuit over allegedly stolen documents is the latest challenge that Meta is facing and comes after the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified earlier this year about child safety online. At the time, lawmakers released internal documents that show how Meta had rejected calls to increase resources to address the issue.
Top officials at Meta were found to have debated the addition of dozens of engineers and other employees to focus on children's well-being and safety. However, one proposal to Zuckerberg, that sought to add 45 new staff members, was declined, according to the New York Times.
