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.
Welp! So much for using facebook
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.
Oh man… this is fucked up on so many levels …
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
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Sadly this is also the case with most other big tech corporations. Seriously fucked up.
“Company follows laws in the country it operates in.” More at 11.
I can’t wait until facebook is integrated with the fediverse.
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.
Can’t you just look at the data in. The database though? No need to login as the user. Surely not every field is hashed
That’s a good point and I don’t know the answer to that (my guess is encryption is involved), but as other people have pointed out, Facebook has an alternate encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, so Facebook is clearly capable of not being able to access its users’ messages.
Wasn’t there strong evidence Facebook has a built-in backdoor to their encryption?
Yeah, based on Signal’s protocol. Signal is the only messaging app I use.
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You are the product. Are you paying money for the service? No? Zero expectation of privacy.
We enable them to make profit via ads and data harvesting. Private texts/DMs do not need to be involved in that.
To be fair, I’d imagine there’s a wealth of data to plug into their AI models from private chats.
I’d imagine it’s hard for them to resist the temptation
Don’t use them. I haven’t had an account for over a decade.
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.
WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram don’t have that issue.
Because they have a back door due to cloud storage.
Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.
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.
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.
Apple didn’t have the means to decrypt the information, but it was within their ability to do (by writing code to do so.)
Happen to have a source for that? That’s nigh impossible for most encryption
E2EE is what prevents this, which is why the TLAs hate it and legislators are trying to prohibit it.
This the same company that owns WhatsApp and is so dead against unencrypting messages on that platform? 🤔
To be fair, if the mother/daughter communicated through WhatsApp they’d not be caught, because it’s an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. But as they chose FB Messenger, they got vulnerable to a court order forcing Facebook to hand over data.
E2E only protects data in transit. Unless the pair also encrypted their data at rest, their messages will still be easily accessed in plain text by their cloud backup.
they actually do encrypted backups nowadays.
By default or is it opt-in? Glad to hear that they have taken steps to remediate the biggest weakness of their service.
I’m not entirely sure. I think I had to opt in when it came out, but I don’t know if they’ve ever changed it.
IIRC it asks if you want to enable backup, and when turning on backup it’s an option to encrypt it with a key or password. So by default there’s no backup at all.
It supports encrypted backups. Plus that adds legal complication of knowing to and getting data from Google/Apple/etc.
Is WhatsApp open source? Even Signal I’m a bit on edge, why would you trust WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook?
WhatsApp was not created by Facebook. It used to be an independent company which major selling point was offering free
encryptedmessaging to the masses, which was mostly relevant to non-US users as they’re charged for SMS usage more directly (it doesn’t come free and unlimited on most plans).It was bought by Facebook in 2014 and by 2016 they implement end-to-end encryption. There’s already various cases of courts around the world trying to compel WhatsApp to hand over messages but they didn’t because they simply don’t store the messages on their servers, and when the messages pass through their servers they’re encrypted by design.
That said, the messages are stored locally on the device or in a cloud backup unless you disable that. If the device is unlocked, the messages are available to whoever has the device.
At this point we’re discussing the mother/daughter screen locking policy. It doesn’t matter what messaging app they use, if they rely solely on Face/Touch ID, the police may force then to unlock their phone anyway.
major selling point was offering free encrypted messaging to the masses
no, their major point was offering free messaging in regions where people were being charged per SMS sent. end-to-end encryption has been introduced in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#End-to-end_encryption), seven years after it’s been founded and two years after Facebook acquisition.
Ops, my bad. I was under the impression the only reason WhatsApp is encrypted today is because they already were by the time FB bought them.
They paid US$ 20B to buy WhatsApp, and encryption is a major deterrent for them scanning all messages to enhance their targeted advertising business.
they have access to the metadata, which can be as valuable as the content of the messages.
Maybe you’re right, but I’d be hesitant to say WhatsApp user’s contacts list would be worth US$ 20B.
My theory is they bought WhatsApp just because it was organically growing to be the dominant messaging app, and Facebook didn’t want to lose this marked and bought them to squash the competition.
Signal should check out as safe and private, considering even after getting multiple warrants from various governments they’ve given up next to no data on any of said requests- because they dont store it, the only thing they had is ‘time of account creation, time of last connected to service’.
For the love of gods everyone please delete FB now
Wish I could. My family uses messenger :(
Were you unable to communicate with them before messenger? :( must have been hard times.
Mine use Messenger too. Deleted it myself, we need to show good example and move society around us forward.
Lol i told my family and friends if they want to talk to me they have to install signal. Those that want to talk to me did and those that don’t didn’t. Problem solved.
So does mine, I deleted it anyway. You’ve got their phone numbers for texting and calling.
Family group chat so it isn’t that easy. On the other hand I never open Facebook so 🤷
It still data mines on your phone even when you don’t open it
If you have android, the duckduckgo browser app has a beta opt-in app tracking blocker service. I activated it a few days ago and it’s been horrifying how many trackers there are. Almost 50,000 since I turned it on maybe 4 days ago.
I don’t disagree. And I totally understand and support people who choose to leave the platform altogether. I will more than likely leave at a certain point, the same way I left reddit.
I was only trying to open up discussion on the topic. I think that for most of us (younger generation) understand a the privacy issues with platforms like Facebook, Google, Tiktok. But I do also believe that for most it’s extremely impractical to abandon that platform. Not everyone can be a pioneer.
That’s the fun part, you don’t have to be a pioneer. There are plenty of well tested and recommended apps that offer E2EE and aren’t under the control of Meta. Post in your family chat telling why the current app is no longer acceptable for use and drop a link to your preferred secure app.
This is why I have 20 fake accs there
As long as I could I stayed off of it. Then it became necessary for work to be able to post to marketplace, and I’m stuck with the app on my phone.
I would love to somehow silo it off from me completely but I would still need to be able to reply to marketplace messages from my phone, so not sure how it’s possible.
Sucks, but is what it is I guess. Not changing jobs over it!
I’m in a similar situation, solution I found was using Android’s “work profile” feature. Look for an app in f-droid called “shelter”.
Not sure about iOS though. Anyway, good luck!
I can’t, the facebook installer is baked into my phone’s bootloader
I hate that phone so much
Oof yeah I feel that. After my last phone broke I finally was able to get a Google Pixel at a good price and then put GrapheneOS on it. No more spyware
I have never heard of GrapheneOS. Is it doable on a Realmi phone?
It is only available on Google Pixel
You could maybe look at LineageOS
And what’s lineageOS now…I have never done custom OS on an Android and I only have one phone. If I can do it without messing up I would love to try
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.
casual european here. YEP!
It’s complicated. Yes, the country is going to shit, but it is also due to meta’s “Big brother-like” data collection in the name of profit margins.
As mentioned in the article, Facebook could remove itself from this problem by not collecting data that could possibly incriminate people. The reason why they were able to hand over the data is because they were collecting their private messages.
Well, they sort of have given the option, with WhatsApp. Which has had full e2ee since 2016, using the signal protocol.
Adding default e2ee on messenger is probably a bit trickier, due to the structure (web client, history saved on the server, and so on)
And why wouldn’t they? Make yourself invaluable to law enforcement and the 3 letter agencies and they will always have your back.
You’re not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.
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.
They never should have? Messenger saves the history on the servers, that’s how that works. How do you think the fireworks would look if users logged in on a new phone or machine and had no chat history?
There are ways it could be stored encrypted, but if that’s a wanted feature they provide WhatsApp
Edit: but this is also why e2ee is so important, and why security experts tell people to use e2ee if possible. At this point, at the top of my head, it’s WhatsApp, signal, I think matrix, and sorta telegram that provides.
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.
they need to make that known by voting for representativea that feel the same
Be nice if it was that simple, but the democratic system itself is broken. We have presidents that come in power while losing the popular vote. We have states that gerrymander their districts to reduce the value of certain demographic’s vote. We have supreme court justices with life terms that are interpretting laws with political bias. Unfortunately, it is getting less and less likely that America is going to improve by working within it’s systems because the system is clearly stacked against us.
If it’s broken, fix it. Facebook won’t fix it for you. (and fuck facebook) So many f’s
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Absolutely. Systems not people.
What the fuck, Facebook?
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
Just because it’s expected at this point doesn’t make it acceptable.
It’s not acceptable for companies to follow the laws of the countries they operate in?
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They are required by law to turn over the chats. This isn’t hard to understand.
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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.)
I swear it’s like you can’t read. This is pretty simple stuff. They aborted a 28 week old fetus (which would be an illegal act in pretty much every state and every place in the world), burned and hid the body, and discussed it over an unencrypted platform. The owner of said platform is legally obligated to turn that info over.
Did anyone notice that this article is a year old?
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