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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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[–] 90 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

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.

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

    It's complicated. Yes, the country is going to shit, but it is also due to meta's "Big brother-like" data collection in the name of profit margins.

    As mentioned in the article, Facebook could remove itself from this problem by not collecting data that could possibly incriminate people. The reason why they were able to hand over the data is because they were collecting their private messages.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    Well, they sort of have given the option, with WhatsApp. Which has had full e2ee since 2016, using the signal protocol.

    Adding default e2ee on messenger is probably a bit trickier, due to the structure (web client, history saved on the server, and so on)

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    You're not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I really don't blame Facebook for not jumping into the abortion debate and martyring themselves. If people don't like the abortion law, or the law that compels facebook to give this information to law enforcement, they need to make that known by voting for representatives that feel the same. Facebook taking a fat lawsuit to the face isn't what's going to change things there - it's women realizing it could happen to them, it's men realizing it could happen to their wife/girlfriend/daughter.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    they need to make that known by voting for representativea that feel the same

    Be nice if it was that simple, but the democratic system itself is broken. We have presidents that come in power while losing the popular vote. We have states that gerrymander their districts to reduce the value of certain demographic's vote. We have supreme court justices with life terms that are interpretting laws with political bias. Unfortunately, it is getting less and less likely that America is going to improve by working within it's systems because the system is clearly stacked against us.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago*

    They never should have? Messenger saves the history on the servers, that's how that works. How do you think the fireworks would look if users logged in on a new phone or machine and had no chat history?

    There are ways it could be stored encrypted, but if that's a wanted feature they provide WhatsApp

    Edit: but this is also why e2ee is so important, and why security experts tell people to use e2ee if possible. At this point, at the top of my head, it's WhatsApp, signal, I think matrix, and sorta telegram that provides.

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