LOS ANGELES _ Saying it had "nothing to hide," the company behind Snapchat released an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed against it by a former employee that claims investors and advertisers were misled about usage data.
Snap Inc. offered a blanket denial of the allegations in the lawsuit, brought in January by former employee Anthony Pompliano.
Pompliano had redacted portions of the lawsuit that may have constituted Snap trade secrets, but he asked a judge last week to unseal it because of the public interest in the claims. The Los Angeles-based technology company complied before a court could rule, noting that as a publicly traded company since last month, some of its usage data is no longer private.
Among the claims Pompliano makes is that Snap executives told unnamed people outside the company that 100 million people used its app each day. But at the time, Snap's internal measurement tool showed just 95 million users, and an external program counted 97 million.
Snap's attorneys wrote Monday that the "minor metrics deviation hardly measures up to Pompliano's gasping rhetoric about Snap being built 'on a house of cards.'"
The company now only uses the internal tool, dubbed Blizzard, to report usage statistics, according to the lawsuit and regulatory filings.
Pompliano's attorney didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Snap did not go into specific detail about why it disputes other newly public passages containing Pompliano's allegations. Those include:
_Snap chief strategy officer Imran Khan asked Pompliano to draw a detailed organizational chart of Facebook's workforce. Pompliano says he refused, according to the lawsuit.
_Snap executives described the user growth rate to Pompliano as being in the double digits, when it was actually about 1 percent to 4 percent.
_Snap executives told unspecified individuals outside the company that 87 percent of users completed the app's registration process and that 40 percent of users kept using the app after a week. Pompliano says the figures were actually about 40 percent and about 20 percent, respectively.
_Chief Executive Evan Spiegel dismissed concerns about the inaccurate data as "no big deal" during a presentation by Pompliano.
Pompliano worked at Snap for three weeks in 2015 before being fired. He's seeking a court order to bar Snap from misrepresenting the reasons for his firing when the company is called on by any of his prospective employers. He alleges Snap labels him as incompetent, when in his view Spiegel wanted him fired for internally raising concerns about the usage measurements.
Pompliano's move to go public with a dispute contractually bound to take place secretly in arbitration "is just one big publicity stunt for him," the company's attorneys reiterated in the Monday filing.
