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.

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Almost all countries have similar systems for obtaining evidence. These people were criminals, they broke the law and the legal system worked as designed to bring them to “justice”. Meta was just a pawn here with very little influence.

    If this story was about a murder rather than an abortion people would think that Meta did the right thing to bring the murderer to justice. As I see it the problem is that people disagree with the law and are using Meta as a scapegoat. But you don’t fix stupid laws by having corporations go vigilante. I’d rather not have billionaires coming up with their own set of laws, that is a recipe for disaster. I think we need to fix the laws, which will fix the root cause of this issue.

    Also use E2EE for all private information, cryptography can’t be compelled to reveal your private data by a court order.

    • LeZero@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Do you think people who collaborated with dictatorial regimes should be excused? Because they followed the law?

      Why didnt Meta implant E2EE on their private chat service then?

      • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        This is what I can agree with. We could blame Meta for encouraging people to give them data. Messenger does actually have E2EE encryption (apparently) but it is quite hidden and limited in functionality. If they made it the default this wouldn’t have been a position they ended up in, and they could have responded to the warrant with “We have no information matching this request.”

        • Tankton@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          If they truly encrypted all chats, they would lose their value to them since its unreadable to meta as well.

      • platypus_plumba@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Because they use what you say to tagert ads and keep a record of who you are. That’s how they make money.

        Which goes back to… You’re just a product. Stop using large platforms for personal shit. That’s their business model, how is it evil if most people know these companies rely on stealing as much information from you as they legally can AND they still use them.