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.
She aborted at 28 weeks. That’s nearly 6 and a half months pregnant. Most babies can survive outside the womb when they’re around 22 to 23 weeks. This was a baby, not some tiny fetus.
You’re right, it’s not Facebook’s business, but this 17-year old and her mother chose to discuss a crime on Facebook’s platform. Facebook had a legal obligation to hand over those messages because they were served a valid warrant.
Yeah, this really shouldn’t be a case people who support abortion rights should stand behind, but I think the focus is on how their chat history might have been compromised, although I´m not sure what people were expecting on that end either. The fediverse will also eventually have to deal with requests from law enforcement as well, too.
If you private message someone else on a web service, your entire conversation is saved on their servers. If you have an app on your phone, then it can be designed to store the messages locally.
The reason the investigation was started wasn’t because someone peaked in on it, it was because there was a buried dead baby.
Not really. I mean, what did you expect from a company that’s responsible for manipulation of two major, major elections (one in the US and UK each) as well as a genocide in SEA?
I thought messenger was end-to-end encrypted, at least according to Facebook. How were they able to hand over the chat logs? The messages should be encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted with user’s password, which Facebook doesn’t store.
And on the official app it isn’t called end to end encryption or even a setting toggle. It’s called secret chat and clicking on it opens a chat from the original chat. The only difference I see is a little lock icon where an emoji usually is.
@linux_user_6967@Goun Telegram's end-to-end encryption isn't enabled by default. You have to specifically choose to start an encrypted chat. Assuming you trust MTProto though, there's no indication they're otherwise implemented poorly.
Actually that page suggests that they can’t access it. They’d never passed the security on it if that page was lying and they don’t encrypt it. Clearly there must be some kind of mechanism they can use to decrypt it for law enforcement. The technicals of that are what I was actually interested in from my original comment.
EDIT: Oh my God I just figured it out. It’s not enabled by default. You have to explicitly turn it on per conversation. That’s terrible
Presumably they maintain full access because they control both ends. The encrypted part would stop others intercepting messages. At least that’s how I’ve always read it
Edit: I’m wrong, end to end does exclude even the app provider from seeing messages. So yeah, either not enabled or they lied
To add to other replies, proprietary apps like messenger can also have backdoor access to your messenger app, where the messages are stored decrypted. I.e. maliciously taking the chat history from either ends of the end-to-end encryption.
I never said I was comfortable with it, but you clearly missed the point I was making.
Worry about what data is being harvested in your own country where a law change can suddenly put you in danger of being arrested before worrying about China having some of your data.
Is it bad how much data the Chinese govt get from you using apps like Tik Tok or phones made by Huawei? Sure, but the threat is a lot closer to home than you think as this article shows.
Here’s a novel concept - we’re against our government doing it too, obviously. I don’t know why you think we wouldn’t be, this is the stupidest divorced from reality gotcha take
It’s kind of stupid to think that one side would use it and the other wouldn’t. Just because they aren’t destroying your privacy for this purpose doesn’t mean left leaning politicians wouldn’t use your data for their own clandestine reasons.
I honestly don’t get this stance. If you believe abortion is killing a human, then you treat it like murder. If you believe it isn’t killing a human, because it really isn’t, then it’s just an inconsequential medical procedure that no one should care about.
@PepperDust@pulaskiwasright that’s the fucked up part. As a man you have the benefit of not needing to know what to think. Women don’t get that luxury. Yet every man’s opinion gets to dictate women’s legality.
That’s how democracy works. Every man has just as much power over whether or not abortion should be legal as every woman has power over whether or not men have to register for the draft.
There hasn’t been a draft since the 1970s. It’s hardly an issue anymore. Yet women have been actually dying and suffering because of a lack of access to life saving medical care since Roe was overturned last year.
Absolutely correct. My point though is that saying “men don’t get to have an opinion” is a silly, and unproductive argument in favor of what should he abortion rights. Representative democracy wouldn’t function at all if no one was allowed to have an opinion on things that they don’t do directly and not let those opinions influence how they vote. That’s a silly argument.
I’m almost certain that if something like this happened to any fediverse instance - that a local police enforcement would contact the admin and asked for user’s data, which they are required by law to provide or they would go to jail/get a hefty fine and possibly a criminal record, they would do that too. That’s also why E2E is required, to prevent such problems for instance admins - but then again, there’s really nothing you can do against local law, and if it requires that you have to be able to cooperate, well… Then there’s not much the admin can do, without putting himself in a real risk of prosecution, because he is breaking the law by have E2E.
That’s also a good reason to be careful when selecting your home instance, and making sure that you choose one in a country that has all right laws in that regard.
Of course, that’s assuming the police makes contact. I don’t suppose that the admins would be searching through the DMs of people to snitch on them. And if Meta is doing that preemtively and is actively snitching on people - that’s downright evil.
which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos. Meta complied with the request
They followed the law. Which they have to do.
This is an issue primarily with the law. It’s not like Meta proactively shared that data.
There’s huge issues with Meta. But they’re mostly beside the point here, and certainly not the problematic power at play here.
Deflecting from law makers, courts, and prosecution to just Meta is misplaced and counter-productive.
If there were actually end to end encryption on the messages, they wouldnt have the ability to decrypt the messages for the government when asked. So either A. Meta lied about their encryption, or they are lying about storing users passwords which is arguably worse as many use passwords for multiple uses even when we know we shouldn’t. If Meta is required to not use encryption then once more I agree users should not use them for any personal messaging. Which is what it sounds people are preaching against here.
Was the form of private messages disclosed? Does meta claim end to end encryption on Facebook/Facebook messenger? That would be new to me.
Having to provide back doors is another issue with the law/government and courts, not Meta or their power.
IMO lying is not an issue of power as the commenter I replied to mentioned. They implied Meta was the perpetrator, the active part in all this. When in fact they either followed law or followed the law while being a shitty company. But they’re not the active part, the cause in this ordeal.
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