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Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

542 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (21 children)

Law enforcement will knock on the doors of Fediverse servers and there will need to be some monetary fund for legal fees.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago (20 children)

If law enforcement knocks on my door with a valid warrant I'm going to comply. It would be nice to have some legal assistance to help validate the warrant but at the end of the day in this case it was almost certainly valid.

If this was about a murder rather than abortion people would be applauding Meta for helping catch the murderer. I think what people are actually mad about is the law, and they are using Meta as a scapegoat.

But at the end of the day E2EE is the best solution here. Don't give private data to others, they can't be trusted because they can be compelled by the law.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Just wondering (INAL): if these women would have been using e2ee, could the police not legally require them to let them read it

Edit: I mean would the women not be required to let the police read the e2ee?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

(Also not a Lawyer) I’m not familiar with the laws in Nebraska, but they wouldn’t be able to get the messages from Meta. They would need to get on the devices, but it seemed like the people charged themselves tipped off about using Messenger to the police. The only other way to get E2EE message from a device without consent is with the use of force.

From the article:

However, campaigners note that Meta always has to comply with legal requests for data, and that the company can only change this if it stops collecting that data in the first place. In the case of Celeste and Jessica Burgess, this would have meant making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the default in Facebook Messenger. This would have meant that police would have had to gain access to the pair’s phones directly to read their chats. (E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)

(…)

However, private chat messages are only one component in a whole range of digital evidence that is likely to be used by police to prosecute illegal abortions in the United States. Investigators will be able to request access to many data sources, including digital health records, Google search history, text messages, and phone location data.

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