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.
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.
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.
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.
Just as an FYI, since it seems like a lot of folks are just reading the headline and not reading the article:
This article was written almost one year ago, so this is not a new development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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