Pinterest said he violated laid-off colleagues’ privacy. Now he’s going public
📖 Full Retelling
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 de …
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Policy Report Tech Pinterest said he violated laid-off colleagues’ privacy. Now he’s going public A former Pinterest engineer says the company mischaracterized the events used to justify his firing. A former Pinterest engineer says the company mischaracterized the events used to justify his firing. by Lauren Feiner Apr 2, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Lauren Feiner is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform. 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 str...
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