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.
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
This the same company that owns WhatsApp and is so dead against unencrypting messages on that platform? 🤔
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.
Is WhatsApp open source? Even Signal I’m a bit on edge, why would you trust WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook?
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.
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’.
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.
This is why Signal is needed now more than ever.
Isn’t this just “Facebook complied with court order”? I dislike their data hoarding like everyone else, but I also think Facebook doesn’t get to decide to ignore court orders.
Yeah, there are plenty of things to be outraged with post Dobbs but this isn’t one; Lemmy really just seems to be in a “let me show off that I’m more liberal than you” growing phase.
It was at 22 weeks beyond most states pre-Dobbs limit (and all but 2 places in Europe), her mother illegally procured and provided abortion pills without medical consultation or supervision and then they tried to burn and dispose of the stillborn fetus. Abortion is safe when done properly, this wasn’t done properly and the idiot mother legitimately put her daughter in danger. They also openly told police they planned it on messenger, in direct violation of “shut the fuck up friday” and did not use messengers “private” mode which would have rendered Meta unable to comply with the properly issued court order. The bottom line is this is the extremely rare case that gives any shred of credibility to the pro-life crowd and should be denounced by all.
You can think the mother and daughter should face consequences AND at the same time think it’s beyond disgusting that facebook even has this info to begin with AND that they handed it over so easily.
The problem isn’t that “facebook followed the law” – it’s that they knowingly created a situation where they could follow the law to begin with. If they would stop collecting so much data and just encrypt their chats, there would already be less of an issue.
I think people have the tendency to think like “well I have nothing to hide, so who cares?” or “well in this case I agree with what happened, so it’s fine.” But laws get changed all the time, government changes all the time. And when a dictator at some point changes some laws, suddenly facebook is ‘following the law’ by giving law enforcement information on who is atheist, or gay, or what books you like, what your political opinions are, etc. They’d still be “following the law” – but just because something is law doesn’t make it right and imo it’s terrifying that companies who have so much money and power (and with it you would hope: responsibility) don’t seem to have any scrupules regarding working with government/LE.
Facebook does get to decide how they store and encrypt their data. Apple and Signal have received court orders in the past, they did comply with, but there was just nothing than meta data zu turn over.
It’s not so easy. The fact they are harvesting so many data makes you vulnerable to law enforcement. If you use a service that doesn’t harvest data and where you can manage these data’s, you will have less tracks.
It’s like putting all your money at the same place. If the bank go bankrupt, you risk a lot.
Oh, I fully agree the mother and daughter should have used a platform that doesn’t harvest data. Facebook is famous for harvesting every scrap of data it can, and abusing it for as much money as they can. Zuck has no conscience whatsoever, and has proven to value money over lives.
And as such, he can’t use end to end encryption, as it would prevent him from abusing the content. Everyone should be aware their messages on Facebook are one warrant away from publicity.
“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
