Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges

"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.

For the love of gods everyone please delete FB now

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.

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.

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.

This the same company that owns WhatsApp and is so dead against unencrypting messages on that platform? 🤔

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.

Did anyone notice that this article is a year old?

How's that end-to-end encryption working out?

Doesn't matter if the company doing the e2e can get your messages.

I’m pretty sure self-aborting and burying a stillborn baby is against the law regardless of the status of Roe.

I can’t wait until facebook is integrated with the fediverse.

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.

Don't talk to the police.

Oh man.. this is fucked up on so many levels .....

Filing this under my increasingly long list on reasons why to never record personal information in any messaging or social media app except signal

This is why Signal is needed now more than ever.

“Private chat history”

Nothing you do on Facebook is private. When will people get that through their thick skulls?

Yeah no shit, they've been don't this in authoritarian countries from the beginning. Surprise, they'll do it here too. shocked Pikachu face

What the fuck, Facebook?

Sadly this is also the case with most other big tech corporations. Seriously fucked up.

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

Permanently Deleted

Welp! So much for using facebook

Gonna Re-Share this resource… PLEASE forward to individuals who may need it! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access

Don't ever admit to anything illegal online. Never.

Remember: This is the company that wants to federate with our communuty-run instances.

Here is a interesting statistics problem:

Let's say 50% of your state wants abortion to be legal. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/nebraska/views-about-abortion/

Lets say 10% wants it legal, but will vote to convict someone that committed an abortion. So, 40% will vote to acquit since they don't see it as a crime. Lets say that of the remaining, 10% of those with obvious views of jury nullification will be kept off of the jury by the prosecution.

Twelve people. Each person will vote to convict 70% of the time and 30% will never vote to convict. What is the chance of a conviction? 70%, right? No, in civil trials you need a majority and in criminal trials you need a unanimous vote. So to get all 12, you will have a (0.7)^12 = 1.3% chance of conviction. Lets say the jury pool reflected Nebraska, 0.5^12= 0.02%. What about if only 10% would vote to block? 0.9^12=28%. Remember, ~10% believe the moon landings were faked. You can get 10% to basically believe anything. Even with the worst case scenario, you have under a 1 in 3 chance of being convicted.

That is why all post-roe laws target doctors and not (directly) women. Much easier to remove someones medical license then to get an abortion conviction.

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What a rotten way to die.

“Company follows laws in the country it operates in.” More at 11.

Terrible from Facebook. Wow.