Yahoo has filed a lawsuit against a former employee the company says leaked confidential information to the author of a new book about the company.
The Sunnyvale, Calif. company (YHOO) claims former senior director Cecile Lal broke confidentiality agreements by sharing information with reporter Nicholas Carlson for his bookMarissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!
Lal is alleged to have shared information that she learned during “FYI” meetings with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. She’s also alleged to have retrieved archived documents and supplied Carlson with her credentials for an internal website, according the the lawsuit filed on Wednesday in state court in San Jose, Calif. and first spotted by Bloomberg.
More broadly, Yahoo claims that Carlson’s book caused “unnecessary distraction within Yahoo’s workforce” and “damaged the integrity of the FYI and Q&A processes” at the company and blames Lal for her role in helping with the book. It also says that Lal’s breach of confidentiality has damaged “the trust on which Yahoo relies in providing its employees with the greatest level of information Yahoo has ever shared with its workforce.”
Lal’s breach of trust and confidentiality also destabilized the trust on which Yahoo relies in providing its employees with the greatest level of information Yahoo has ever shared with its workforce. Among the most aggrieved by these breaches are Yahoo’s employees themselves, a highly motivated and energized workforce which has expressed great appreciation for Yahoo’s transparency and has bemoaned the breaches of trust.
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At some point, Lal apparently provided Carlson with her username and password to access a password-protected site where Yahoo information was stored. As he explained on June 23, 2014, “I purposefully didn’t write down your user and password, so we’ll have to catch up again on the phone if you’d rather not email the u/pw to me.” Two days later (on June 25, 2014), Carlson confirmed that he had apparently accessed the aforementioned password-protected site by telling Lal that it “looks like I am still logged[]in. So I will check there every once in awhile. Just finished going through and taking notes on the material provided so far. Such a huge help.”
In response to Fortune inquiry, a Yahoo spokesperson said: “We can’t comment on active litigation.”