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.
We need to be clear here. Don’t hate Meta/Facebook for complying with a legal search warrant. That’s the law. Hate Meta/Facebook for having the ability to hand over private chat messages at all. End-to-End Encryption is the only answer. It’s not about trust, it’s about the ability.
End-to-End Encryption is the only answer.
With OpenSource, audited, and user-controlled software.
Any software that could be ordered by a third party (like Meta) to send the E2E keys to the server, while sending all the encrypted messaged through the same server, is not to be trusted.
This would be bigger news had they broken WA E2EE. Indeed, the officials might prefer not to disclose the capability if they had it and this wouldn’t have happened. (Except, maybe, via parallel construction.)
That’s the law.
Yeah, I don’t buy that, not when you have the obscene money and power that Meta has. They could have fought it and resisted, but they didn’t. This is the same company that literally just stole a trademark and absolutely nothing meaningful happened to them because of it.
You don’t buy that it’s the law?
not when you have the obscene money and power that Meta has. They could have fought it and resisted,
What you’re saying is because Meta is rich, they don’t have to obey the law?
What you’re saying is because Meta is rich, they don’t have to obey the law?
Anyone who’s rich in America doesn’t have to obey the law. That’s not a matter of opinion. There’s a clear and observable imbalance between the rich and poor in regard to the outcomes experienced in the American justice system.
Yes, that is what is happening. But that’s not what I’m asking. I know there’s imbalance between the rich and the poor in the justice system. What I’m asking is, is that how it should be?
You’ve accepted that as an acceptable thing that rich people/companies don’t have to obey the law, and that rich people/companies obeying the law is a bad thing? Because what you’ve said above is that because Meta is rich, so they shouldn’t obey the law.
is that how it should be?
No, you’ve accepted that rich people/companies don’t have to obey the law. (Or, at least, that’s the tenor of your commentary.)
Therefore it needed to said that, no, they don’t have to obey the law. They’re complicit in the corruption that’s forcing this young woman to account for an abortion that should already be legal, at least in a just society.
They could have said okay here you g… oooops jeez it’s gone. Wow how did that happen. Oh well.
They’re a branch of the government at this point. Call it investing in avoiding the kind of scrutiny they should have been under the moment they started psychological experiments on the public.
They admitted to it but I don’t see Zuck the fuck in jail do you?
I’m sure there were plenty of strategies, but we all know that the justice system for a mega-corporation in America is way, way different than the justice system for a poor or middle class individual, so it’s laughable to me that anyone would look at this scenario, shrug, and pretend that Meta didn’t have any recourse in order to do the right thing.
Yeah it’s not even a discussion whether they could fight something like a subpoena, and even companies that would like to sometimes can’t afford to do it. But Facebook practically works for them, they seem to have some kind of arrangement behind the scenes - if not an out and out partnership. They are glad and willing always to provide the government with everything they ask for.
Maybe this is how Zuck the schmuck has stayed out of jail for the shit he’s done; maybe he’s worth far more being their espionage tool.
Between them and Amazon just collecting data and handing it over to any TLA that wants it.
Hate american legislative / politics instead? Don’t hate the player, hate the game?
You’re right. e2ee is a good thing.
Fuck Meta
This is an infuriating story for sure, but I just want to clarify for anybody just seeing it for the first time that it happened in 2022.
I knew it sounded familiar. I remember this.
Honestly though, if anything things have only gotten worse not better.
It terrifies me! This news was shocking for about three days. Now, a year later, we know law enforcement is buying info from data brokers and google has gone back on their “promise” to delete sensitive location data for people who visit abortion clinics. And it’s just crickets from lawmakers, nothing from regulators, except that maybe we should ban one specific app. I knew the fourth amendment wasn’t real anymore after prism but dear god it just keeps escalating with every year of my adulthood. Panopticon ass country.
If only people could be united to sacrifice one giant company make an example of them. But you couldn’t get ten Americans to fart in synchronicity unless you were paying them and their streaming services were offline. “Revolutionary changes for the better to our economy? Nah, I’m good.”
I actually disagree a bit - I think there’s very little incentive (regardless of what americans might want) for government bodies to ever truly regulate any of these companies because they give them so much more power to surveil and prevent dissent and, essentially, do things that our government is not supposed to be able to do, but “legally” through loopholes. Maybe I’m an optimist, but i do think a majority of people want revolutionary changes for the better to our economy- and accountability from corporations (who are currently acting almost in the capacity of unelected governments in many cases), and data privacy. But the people who would have the power to regulate meta and google and the rest just…don’t wanna. People come together, or try to, people lobby and make phone calls and protest, movements do exist, but lawmakers with sufficient power to change things are just deliberately unresponsive, because they work for capital, not us. We definitely have a low degree of fart synchronization here, but I don’t think it’s our only problem when it comes to things like meta. Meta has as much power as congress, but we can’t vote them out.
I work for an agency that works with victims of crime. State and federal laws allow for privileged, confidential communication. We have had people ask for help via social media. This is very concerning.
I would honestly hope you bring it up to your agency to start offering chat channels that are end to end encrypted and have all history wiped clean after certain period of time.
I shared the article this morning and we have all been discussing this. One option is to request they immediately switch to Whatsapp and delete the FB message. The good part, is that our state coalition is already looking into this.
One of the many, many, many reasons to keep Meta out of the Fediverse if it can be managed.
I’m sure this is completely fine.
This is a tough one. Let’s replace abortion with a crime, robbery? If someone stole your grand pappys rolex and talked about it on Meta, I think most would agree that it was proper. If people talked about assaulting someone, most would agree that it’s proper as well. Add a late term abortion into the conversation, it becomes controversial.
Edit*
Others are correct the tech page isn’t the place to debate medical stuff.
I think if a crime is committed via the law, Facebook should comply. If there wasn’t political component, this wouldn’t even be a conversation.
Stupid to talk about anything on Facebook.
If it had been phone company turning over text messages then I’d be livid. But seriously who fucking trusts Facebook with that kind of thing? After everything they’ve done that’s been proven why would anyone trust them with an iota of private information?
Not that I’m cool with this, or that awareness isn’t good, but has there really been no new developments and nothing new to say about this in 11 months? Did they get charged? Convicted? Has anyone else faced this issue since then? Facebook hasn’t had a comment since then?
The daughter plead guilty, scheduled to Jul 20th for sentencing. The mother is going to trial on the 14th. If convicted, she’ll get another sentencing hearing.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger
… why would they do that?
