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Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 31 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

To be fair, if the mother/daughter communicated through WhatsApp they'd not be caught, because it's an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. But as they chose FB Messenger, they got vulnerable to a court order forcing Facebook to hand over data.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Is WhatsApp open source? Even Signal I'm a bit on edge, why would you trust WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook?

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  • [–] 24 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

    WhatsApp was not created by Facebook. It used to be an independent company which major selling point was offering free encrypted messaging to the masses, which was mostly relevant to non-US users as they're charged for SMS usage more directly (it doesn't come free and unlimited on most plans).

    It was bought by Facebook in 2014 and by 2016 they implement end-to-end encryption. There's already various cases of courts around the world trying to compel WhatsApp to hand over messages but they didn't because they simply don't store the messages on their servers, and when the messages pass through their servers they're encrypted by design.

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  • [+] 20 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Ops, my bad. I was under the impression the only reason WhatsApp is encrypted today is because they already were by the time FB bought them.

    They paid US$ 20B to buy WhatsApp, and encryption is a major deterrent for them scanning all messages to enhance their targeted advertising business.

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  • [+] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Maybe you're right, but I'd be hesitant to say WhatsApp user's contacts list would be worth US$ 20B.

    My theory is they bought WhatsApp just because it was organically growing to be the dominant messaging app, and Facebook didn't want to lose this marked and bought them to squash the competition.

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  • [+] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That said, the messages are stored locally on the device or in a cloud backup unless you disable that. If the device is unlocked, the messages are available to whoever has the device.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    At this point we're discussing the mother/daughter screen locking policy. It doesn't matter what messaging app they use, if they rely solely on Face/Touch ID, the police may force then to unlock their phone anyway.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Signal should check out as safe and private, considering even after getting multiple warrants from various governments they've given up next to no data on any of said requests- because they dont store it, the only thing they had is 'time of account creation, time of last connected to service'.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    E2E only protects data in transit. Unless the pair also encrypted their data at rest, their messages will still be easily accessed in plain text by their cloud backup.

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  • [+] 5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    By default or is it opt-in? Glad to hear that they have taken steps to remediate the biggest weakness of their service.

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