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

Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml to Technology@beehaw.org – 409 points –
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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This is an infuriating story for sure, but I just want to clarify for anybody just seeing it for the first time that it happened in 2022.

I knew it sounded familiar. I remember this.

Honestly though, if anything things have only gotten worse not better.

It terrifies me! This news was shocking for about three days. Now, a year later, we know law enforcement is buying info from data brokers and google has gone back on their “promise” to delete sensitive location data for people who visit abortion clinics. And it’s just crickets from lawmakers, nothing from regulators, except that maybe we should ban one specific app. I knew the fourth amendment wasn’t real anymore after prism but dear god it just keeps escalating with every year of my adulthood. Panopticon ass country.

If only people could be united to sacrifice one giant company make an example of them. But you couldn’t get ten Americans to fart in synchronicity unless you were paying them and their streaming services were offline. “Revolutionary changes for the better to our economy? Nah, I’m good.”

I actually disagree a bit - I think there’s very little incentive (regardless of what americans might want) for government bodies to ever truly regulate any of these companies because they give them so much more power to surveil and prevent dissent and, essentially, do things that our government is not supposed to be able to do, but “legally” through loopholes. Maybe I’m an optimist, but i do think a majority of people want revolutionary changes for the better to our economy- and accountability from corporations (who are currently acting almost in the capacity of unelected governments in many cases), and data privacy. But the people who would have the power to regulate meta and google and the rest just…don’t wanna. People come together, or try to, people lobby and make phone calls and protest, movements do exist, but lawmakers with sufficient power to change things are just deliberately unresponsive, because they work for capital, not us. We definitely have a low degree of fart synchronization here, but I don’t think it’s our only problem when it comes to things like meta. Meta has as much power as congress, but we can’t vote them out.