Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges
Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges
Unencrypted chat history is a prime target for police
A stark example of how digital footprints will be utilized in a post-Roe America
The article is from Aug 10, 2022 but remains relevant
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Honestly, it does not look like Facebook did something wrong when you read the article. A pregnant woman used a medicine to trigger a miscarriage, then she and her mother got rid of the body. Police knew that they've discussed this in Facebook messenger. They contacted Facebook and received chat messages. Then police used those messages to incriminate women according to existing law. The only problem here is that a woman could go to an abortion clinic and do it properly and legally if not for obnoxious laws in some states. But that's a completely different issue
It is not a different issue. It is an issue of basic human rights.
A woman's right to agency over her body is an unalienable human right. The existing laws violate her human right.
Then police used those messages to incriminate women according to existing law.
"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws. " - Martin Luther King, Jr. in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)
it does not look like Facebook did something wrong
Illegal. You mean to say it doesn't look like Facebook did something illegal. It's undeniable (unless you hate women) that Facebook did something wrong in helping a fascist state oppress women.
Illegality and morality are not the same.
It would also be literally illegal for Facebook to have not done this. They were given a legally binding warrant.
If you honestly would personally go to jail rather than comply with a warrant, that speaks pretty highly to your credit, but I don't think most people would find Facebook to be particularly culpable here. Facebook Messenger does actually offer an encrypted messaging service that, to my knowledge, has never been turned over to law enforcement because it is technically impossible for them to do that. That isn't the default setting though, and it's unfortunate that the people involved here weren't aware of it.
Just to be very clear, these laws are reprehensible. However, my anger is largely reserved for the politicians and voters responsible for them. It's a pretty big ask to demand someone personally risk jail time by refusing to comply with a valid warrant.
If you honestly would personally go to jail rather than comply with a warrant, that speaks pretty highly to your credit, but I don't think most people would find Facebook to be particularly culpable here.
This would be more compelling point if FB were a person capable of going to jail and/or did not have a history of taking the user-hostile side of privacy situations, regardless of whether the law agreed with them.
That isn't the default setting though, and it's unfortunate that the people involved here weren't aware of it.
This right here is why I personally believe FB deserves and flak they get from this situation. They could avoid the whole conversation about whether they should turn over the conversations if they made it so they couldn't. They've chosen their data mine over user privacy, and people are right to judge them accordingly.
Facebook may not be a person, but there are people within Facebook who absolutely can and would be held personally liable for refusing to comply with a warrant, up to and including going to jail.
That Facebook Messenger isn't E2E encrypted definitely is something that can and should be criticized, and they could absolutely do a lot more to educate users on how safe their information is or isn't. On the flip-side, to their credit, WhatsApp is, by default, E2E encrypted. I'd honestly be curious how much value they really get out of Messenger not being encrypted, since if it's really that high, the value from WhatsApp would be significantly higher.
I'm not saying that this is the only reason - because I'm sure they do get some financial value out of it as well - but if you wanted to be charitable, you could say that users generally expect Facebook Messenger to be equally available across devices with full message history, which isn't really feasible when you're signing messages with device-specific keys.
It would also be literally illegal for Facebook to have not done this.
And? It's not like they've ever given a shit about the law when they want to do something that benefits them.
Unjust laws aren't worth following, and Facebook has the power to fight them. They choose not to.
I'd genuinely be curious what you'd do if police showed up to your door with a warrant ready to take you to jail if you didn't comply.
Maybe you'd actually refuse, I don't know. But I think there are a whole lot more people who want to think that they would refuse and suffer very real consequences of it than would actually do it.
Thanks to Citizens United, corporations are people. But people are not corporations.
They do not have an army of corporate attorneys, nor do they employ lobbying firms to buy political support, nor do they have enormous wealth to fall back on. People simply do not enjoy the protections corporations do. Yet its regular people who frequently take a stand against wrong, and not multi-billion corporations.
Facebook/Meta, a corporate with tremendous resources, made promises about defending access to reproductive healthcare in a post-Roe world and it should be questioned for failing to keep their word. Getting personal (like you just did with @Kichae) just shifts responsibility away from facebook/meta for its actions.
Regardless, there are very much actual people within Meta that can and would be held legally liable for refusing to comply with a valid warrant, up to and including going to jail.
I agree that there are plenty to things to criticize Meta for. They could do a lot more to educate users about what privacy they do or don't have and the legal consequences of that. They could direct more people to Messenger's private mode, which is end-to-end encrypted. I don't think the act of complying with a warrant is something that I would really hold against them though, because 99% of people would do the same thing.
Regardless of the politics surrounding abortion, Facebook chat never claims to be encrypted nor secure. Users should be aware that their chats are available in this capacity and should also be aware that platforms like Signal exist which are encrypted and secure.
Facebook Messenger does actually offer an end-to-end encrypted service, though it's not the default setting.
Except it is encrypted, and pretty secure. That's not really related to the issue. Facebook complied with a subpoena as they are legally required to do so. Signal would have to do the same. The only difference there is that Signal doesn't retain decryption keys for your data so subpoenaing them would be pretty pointless except to prove that some conversation happened.
They're exploiting the fact people don't know how it works. They see "https", they think cops can't see anything
The takeaway from this article, IMHO, isn't "Facebook did something terrible" so much as "when you live in a world where the government is terrible, services which compromise your privacy can be exploited against you." It no longer becomes a matter of "advertisers have access to my intimate details" but "people with the power to jail me unjustly have access to my intimate details."
I mean, it's reprehensible for Facebook to have done that, but we kind of never expected them to be the good guys. It's more "the compromise of our basic privacy is more dangerous than you might have thought when it was just being used to advertise to us."
Uh, did you miss this part?
"Since the reversal of Roe, Facebook’s parent company Meta and other Big Tech companies have made lofty promises about defending access to reproductive healthcare,” Caitlin Seeley George, managing director of nonprofit Fight for our Future, said in a statement. “At the same time, these companies’ hypocritical surveillance practices make them complicit in the criminalization of people seeking, facilitating, and providing abortions.”
legal != right
Read this somewhere "If something is banned in EU it likely violates human rights, but if something is banned in a republican state it probably is a human right."
:(