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