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.

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    “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.

  • twentyfumble@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • frumpyfries@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You’re not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.

      • Taokan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • IlllIIIlllIlllI@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Skyrmir@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • ModdedPhones@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.

      • EricHill78@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.