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.
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.
For the love of gods everyone please delete FB now
Wish I could. My family uses messenger :(
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 🤷
It still data mines on your phone even when you don’t open it
I don’t disagree. And I totally understand and support people who choose to leave the platform altogether. I will more than likely leave at a certain point, the same way I left reddit.
I was only trying to open up discussion on the topic. I think that for most of us (younger generation) understand a the privacy issues with platforms like Facebook, Google, Tiktok. But I do also believe that for most it’s extremely impractical to abandon that platform. Not everyone can be a pioneer.
Lol i told my family and friends if they want to talk to me they have to install signal. Those that want to talk to me did and those that don’t didn’t. Problem solved.
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Were you unable to communicate with them before messenger? :( must have been hard times.
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 have never heard of GrapheneOS. Is it doable on a Realmi phone?
It is only available on Google Pixel
You could maybe look at LineageOS
And what’s lineageOS now…I have never done custom OS on an Android and I only have one phone. If I can do it without messing up I would love to try
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
encryptedmessaging 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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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
It supports encrypted backups. Plus that adds legal complication of knowing to and getting data from Google/Apple/etc.
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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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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.
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.
This is the corrrect answer
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.
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.
Did anyone notice that this article is a year old?
Yeah 🙄
I can’t wait until facebook is integrated with the fediverse.
This is why Signal is needed now more than ever.
It’s the only messaging app I use. Idk why people are opposed to using it, but I’ve gotten a bunch of friends to migrate and once on it, they all enjoy the experience.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Also don’t talk about crimes you commit via any messaging app ever.
“Private chat history”
Nothing you do on Facebook is private. When will people get that through their thick skulls?
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.
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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.
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.
Why should they make an effort to break the laws of countries they do business in? If they don’t like the laws, they shouldn’t do business there.
Don’t ever admit to anything illegal online. Never.
I do the opposite. Admit to every single thing, keep’em guessing what’s true.
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.
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.
WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram don’t have that issue.
Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.
Because they have a back door due to cloud storage.
I noticed the article me tioned that the women told the police that they communicated over Facebook Messenger. I wonder what prompted them to spill the beans, or if they were unaware of the implications of telling them how they communicated about the situation. If this is true, it doesn’t sound like the police is sending warrants for everyone online to request their data, but it still makes me very cautious about unencrypted messaging
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