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.
“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.
This is exactly the point I’ve made to friends and family. They complain I’m not on social media like they are and it makes it more difficult to connect with me on things, but I refuse. I will not use services that blatantly disrespect my privacy.
Same, They treat me like some tinfoil hat conspiracist because I refuse to sign up for social media.
and all the links to news stories showing how these companies abuse that information, like in the above news story, are met with handwaves and eye rolls… Cause they wont care or listen until the leopard eats their face.
Employers and romantic partners can be especially put off if they can’t find any trace of you online. And if they really care, they’ll dig harder to find that time where you declared bankruptcy, or you got arrested for public intoxication, or where someone deep in your past said something negative about you, and that’s all that will stick in your mind when they think of you.
For me personally, having a simple, but relatively barren social media presence is worth it to avoid the persistent diggers, who will find something about you if they don’t see anything public.
And besides, everything about most of us is already stored in Apple or Google’s datacenters. There’s no hiding from the deeply intrusive data collection those companies do. So having some simple information out in the open is likely better for privacy in some ways.
If you disagree with my take, that’s fine, I just wanted to give another perspective.
I know, I have no social media and just left reddit too. I hate it when I hear that not being on social media is a “red flag” in the dating scene. But I guess I wouldn’t want to be with someone who cared so little about privacy anyway.
Laws are such that everyone breaks at least one every single day, which allows for elselective enforcement.
Pretty much true. Probably people don’t even consider/realize how many times daily they violate copyrights laws which Congress has empowered the FBI with the absolute discretion and legal justification to pursue anyone for at any time violating some section of the DMCA or other laws which can result in absolutely life destroying penalties. Now of course the FBI doesn’t often pursue individuals for piracy or whatever (they had a stint of doing so in the early 2000s but I think the insanely bad PR + 9/11 distracted them away), but they could. And anyone who has ever skimmed the methods of how the FBI operates just imagine “legalized mafia.” Not more moral, and in a lot of ways worse. If they suspect you or X crime (doesn’t actually matter what it is, “real crime or bullshit crime”) they can lean on your ass with the built-in “well, we already know from your phone and harddrive you had 25 pirated movies and software. We could just charge you with that if you don’t sign this document admitting to [crime some agent wants on his record].” It’s just classic extortion type bullshit. Everyone is a criminal so we can grab anyone for almost any thing “legally” at any time and make them admit to anything we want. It’s insanely fucked up on a billion levels. (And don’t grt hung up on the piracy hypothetical, it can be anything like drug possession for personal use that they’ll easily call “intent to distribute.” Yes, even weed.)
And you didn’t even mention driving. Every single time someone drives, they break a law, whether it’s not using your turn signal properly, speeding 1 mile over the speed limit, or even wearing headphones.
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?
I’ve been making this argument for years. I know I’ll be on a list if my country slips into fascism, as it appears to be hell-bent on achieving during my lifetime.
Similar to this one from a few days ago, granted Reddit is trying to do the right thing here but I think it’s clear the Overton window on free speech has shifted
For the love of gods everyone please delete FB now
So does mine, I deleted it anyway. You’ve got their phone numbers for texting and calling.
Family group chat so it isn’t that easy. On the other hand I never open Facebook so 🤷
As long as I could I stayed off of it. Then it became necessary for work to be able to post to marketplace, and I’m stuck with the app on my phone.
I would love to somehow silo it off from me completely but I would still need to be able to reply to marketplace messages from my phone, so not sure how it’s possible.
Sucks, but is what it is I guess. Not changing jobs over it!
I can’t, the facebook installer is baked into my phone’s bootloader
I hate that phone so much
Oof yeah I feel that. After my last phone broke I finally was able to get a Google Pixel at a good price and then put GrapheneOS on it. No more spyware
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.
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.
You’re not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can’t you just look at the data in. The database though? No need to login as the user. Surely not every field is hashed
Hashing is not reversible so obviously it is not hashed. You hash data you want to compare later to see if it is still the same. For example you may hash user passwords you store in your database. So you don’t know the actual password, but can confirm later that the same password is still being used. You know or can infer someone is storing your passwords in plaintext when they have a maximum length as that indicates they are not correctly hashing.
It is however possible and even easy in many databases to do row or document level encryption. Many privacy first applications do client side keys and encryption so the database does in fact have no plain text in it.
That’s a good point and I don’t know the answer to that (my guess is encryption is involved), but as other people have pointed out, Facebook has an alternate encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, so Facebook is clearly capable of not being able to access its users’ messages.
You are the product. Are you paying money for the service? No? Zero expectation of privacy.
We enable them to make profit via ads and data harvesting. Private texts/DMs do not need to be involved in that.
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.
Just as an FYI, since it seems like a lot of folks are just reading the headline and not reading the article:
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This article was written almost one year ago, so this is not a new development.
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This alleged offense occurred before any changes to local abortion laws (Nebraska in this case) were made, meaning this is an incident that would have still been illegal under Roe.
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Meta was served a legal subpoena requiring them to turn over all the data they had. Whether that data should have been E2E encrypted is another debate entirely, but they didn’t voluntarily disclose anything.
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The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level, and so state jurisdiction did not matter for the purposes of this subpoena. -
Even under California’s current sanctuary status (where Meta is headquartered) which protects out-of-state individuals seeking abortions, this was a late-term abortion at 28 weeks, which is still illegal under Californian law.
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To contextualize that for our friends in Europe, this would have been illegal in every EU country, too (short of it being needed as a life-saving intervention, as in most of the US), so this is not a US-exclusive problem.
While this is a mostly great post, I’d point out one error:
The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level
Felonies exist at both the Federal and State level. Just because something is a felony, does not mean it moves to Federal jurisdiction. And this case appears to have been filed in the Madison County District Court which is part of the Nebraska Judicial Branch. The cases themselves can be found on the District Court’s Calendar though you have to put the details in yourself. The cases IDs are CR220000175 and CR220000132 against the woman and her mother respectively. Getting the court documents themselves appears to require paying a fee to do the search and I don’t care enough about a random comment on the internet to pay for it.
There seems to be one document uploaded here which shows the charges against the woman. And this shows the sections of Nebraska State law under which the woman is being charged. Of the three charges, only the first is a felony. Specifically it’s a Class IV felony under Section 28-1301 of Nebraska State Law. And that law concerns moving buried human remains. The other two charges are misdemeanors for concealing the death of another person and lying to a peace officer.
tl;dr - Felonies exist at both the State and Federal level and jurisdiction is dependent on which laws (State or Federal) are at issue.
Thanks, that was a gap in my knowledge. I’ve edited my post to redact that element.
I had meant to do that much earlier today when I first saw your comment, but the fallout from our instance’s recent oopsie appeared to have been preventing me from editing/writing comments. Hope late is better than never.
