cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
For all of those saying Facebook was just complying with the law- there is absolutely no reason for Facebook to have access to its users’ private information. The company I work for can’t do anything with a customer’s account unless they give us the password. We can’t see anything they have saved there. All of the private stuff they have is private and even if a court ordered us to show it to them, we literally couldn’t comply.
We’re a small company and we can do it. A company the size of Meta can certainly do it.
You can do it because you’re a small company. Get enough attention, and the FBI will force you to decrypt on demand. They’ve done it before and the supreme court backed them up. Do it over seas and expect your US traffic to get blocked, if they don’t raid your offices.
That is untrue. The FBI tried to get Apple to decrypt a shooter’s iPhone in Florida a few years back and they wouldn’t budge.
This isn’t quite right…
Apple didn’t have the means to decrypt the information, but it was within their ability to do (by writing code to do so.)
But asking a company for the unencrypted data, and forcing a company to produce a new application, are completely different things.
WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram don’t have that issue.
Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.
“Why should I care about my privacy? I don’t do anything illegal.”
Hmm? Do we now acknowledge that laws and public perceptions of your actions can change with time, and that you may one day become a “criminal” for continuing behaviors that were once legal?
To preempt the “but it should just be legal” whataboutists: Of course it should just be legal, but “criminal charges” suggests that it isn’t, and privacy helps you not get caught. Furthermore, this issue contains but is not limited to abortion. It’s time that “normal” people wake the fuck up and get on board with privacy rights.
I don’t particularly like Facebook but…
If a country makes it legal to criminally prosecute girls who seek an abortion, and the same country makes it legal to allow police enforcement to demand tech companies to handover their data, maybe the problem is the country and its laws, more than Facebook.
You’re not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.
Why should they make an effort to break the laws of countries they do business in? If they don’t like the laws, they shouldn’t do business there.
I’m pretty sure self-aborting and burying a stillborn baby is against the law regardless of the status of Roe.
This is 100% true, but also this is less of a Facebook bad issue and more of a state law issue.
Facebook was subpoenaed to provide this info, they didn’t willingly hand it over. I’d be interested to see how many lemmings here jumping down the meta bad rabbithole would have the stones to ignore a subpoena lmao.
Well it could have been end to end encrypted leaving no way to turn anything over. It’s like turning over someones mail after it has been delivered because you made a copy of everything that came through.
Or, and I know Meta would find this absurd, but maybe don’t collect that data to begin with?!
How… do you think messaging platforms work?
How’s that end-to-end encryption working out?
Doesn’t matter if the company doing the e2e can get your messages.
but fb messenger is not e2e encrypted at all. If the company is doing e2e then they can’t read your messages
This is true, FB messenger is as open as it will get with seeing your messages, WhatsApp is dubious too so either Signal or Session are best e2e messenger apps imo.
I have never heard of them, are they social media apps?
The two apps I’ve mentioned are exclusively messenger apps. Think of Facebooks messenger but more secure with no big company servers looking at your chat and messages.
It is if you enable secret messages for a conversation, I believe, but not the default chat mode. In either case people should use other apps.
but only on mobile apps afaik. So if you use it, be careful
“Company follows laws in the country it operates in.” More at 11.
