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

Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.world – 1044 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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"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.

This is exactly the point I’ve made to friends and family. They complain I’m not on social media like they are and it makes it more difficult to connect with me on things, but I refuse. I will not use services that blatantly disrespect my privacy.

Same, They treat me like some tinfoil hat conspiracist because I refuse to sign up for social media.

and all the links to news stories showing how these companies abuse that information, like in the above news story, are met with handwaves and eye rolls.. Cause they wont care or listen until the leopard eats their face.

Employers and romantic partners can be especially put off if they can't find any trace of you online. And if they really care, they'll dig harder to find that time where you declared bankruptcy, or you got arrested for public intoxication, or where someone deep in your past said something negative about you, and that's all that will stick in your mind when they think of you.

For me personally, having a simple, but relatively barren social media presence is worth it to avoid the persistent diggers, who will find something about you if they don't see anything public.

And besides, everything about most of us is already stored in Apple or Google's datacenters. There's no hiding from the deeply intrusive data collection those companies do. So having some simple information out in the open is likely better for privacy in some ways.

If you disagree with my take, that's fine, I just wanted to give another perspective.

Employers and romantic partners can be especially put off if they can’t find any trace of you online

Good. I dont want to be involved in anyone that obsessive over social media.

It's not that they're obsessive over social media, they're just used to being able to simply look up general information about people online through social media sites. And if you don't present anything for them to find, it often encourages further digging.

But you do you, I'm not trying to change your mind.

I know, I have no social media and just left reddit too. I hate it when I hear that not being on social media is a "red flag" in the dating scene. But I guess I wouldn't want to be with someone who cared so little about privacy anyway.

Posting "I have no social media" on lemmy. I guess lemmy is antisosial media

Sorry to say, it's not disrespect. It's a contract. You want to connect, you sell off your ~~soul ~~ data.

THIS SERVICE IS NOT FREE OF COST. is not plainly written in the contract, but here they are; "disrespected".

Laws are such that everyone breaks at least one every single day, which allows for elselective enforcement.

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?

I've been making this argument for years. I know I'll be on a list if my country slips into fascism, as it appears to be hell-bent on achieving during my lifetime.

For the love of gods everyone please delete FB now

Wish I could. My family uses messenger :(

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

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.

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.

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.

Were you unable to communicate with them before messenger? :( must have been hard times.

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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

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!

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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.

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.

And why wouldn't they? Make yourself invaluable to law enforcement and the 3 letter agencies and they will always have your back.

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)

You're not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.

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

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.

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.

Both can be wrong. The law can be bad and the people under orders (as if one of the worlds biggest corporation can be ordered to do anything by a small town judge) can also be bad.

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

Hashing is not reversible so obviously it is not hashed. You hash data you want to compare later to see if it is still the same. For example you may hash user passwords you store in your database. So you don’t know the actual password, but can confirm later that the same password is still being used. You know or can infer someone is storing your passwords in plaintext when they have a maximum length as that indicates they are not correctly hashing.

It is however possible and even easy in many databases to do row or document level encryption. Many privacy first applications do client side keys and encryption so the database does in fact have no plain text in it.

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.

Yeah, based on Signal's protocol. Signal is the only messaging app I use.

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

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.

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.

WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram don't have that issue.

Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.

Because they have a back door due to cloud storage.

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.

While this is a mostly great post, I'd point out one error:

The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level

Felonies exist at both the Federal and State level. Just because something is a felony, does not mean it moves to Federal jurisdiction. And this case appears to have been filed in the Madison County District Court which is part of the Nebraska Judicial Branch. The cases themselves can be found on the District Court's Calendar though you have to put the details in yourself. The cases IDs are CR220000175 and CR220000132 against the woman and her mother respectively. Getting the court documents themselves appears to require paying a fee to do the search and I don't care enough about a random comment on the internet to pay for it.

There seems to be one document uploaded here which shows the charges against the woman. And this shows the sections of Nebraska State law under which the woman is being charged. Of the three charges, only the first is a felony. Specifically it's a Class IV felony under Section 28-1301 of Nebraska State Law. And that law concerns moving buried human remains. The other two charges are misdemeanors for concealing the death of another person and lying to a peace officer.

tl;dr - Felonies exist at both the State and Federal level and jurisdiction is dependent on which laws (State or Federal) are at issue.

Thanks, that was a gap in my knowledge. I've edited my post to redact that element.

I had meant to do that much earlier today when I first saw your comment, but the fallout from our instance's recent oopsie appeared to have been preventing me from editing/writing comments. Hope late is better than never.

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.

Facebook does get to decide how they store and encrypt their data. Apple and Signal have received court orders in the past, they did comply with, but there was just nothing than meta data zu turn over.

It's not so easy. The fact they are harvesting so many data makes you vulnerable to law enforcement. If you use a service that doesn't harvest data and where you can manage these data's, you will have less tracks.

It's like putting all your money at the same place. If the bank go bankrupt, you risk a lot.

Oh, I fully agree the mother and daughter should have used a platform that doesn't harvest data. Facebook is famous for harvesting every scrap of data it can, and abusing it for as much money as they can. Zuck has no conscience whatsoever, and has proven to value money over lives.

And as such, he can't use end to end encryption, as it would prevent him from abusing the content. Everyone should be aware their messages on Facebook are one warrant away from publicity.

Yeah, there are plenty of things to be outraged with post Dobbs but this isn’t one; Lemmy really just seems to be in a “let me show off that I’m more liberal than you” growing phase.

It was at 22 weeks beyond most states pre-Dobbs limit (and all but 2 places in Europe), her mother illegally procured and provided abortion pills without medical consultation or supervision and then they tried to burn and dispose of the stillborn fetus. Abortion is safe when done properly, this wasn’t done properly and the idiot mother legitimately put her daughter in danger. They also openly told police they planned it on messenger, in direct violation of “shut the fuck up friday” and did not use messengers “private” mode which would have rendered Meta unable to comply with the properly issued court order. The bottom line is this is the extremely rare case that gives any shred of credibility to the pro-life crowd and should be denounced by all.

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.

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 encrypted messaging 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.

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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'.

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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.

It supports encrypted backups. Plus that adds legal complication of knowing to and getting data from Google/Apple/etc.

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

This is why Signal is needed now more than ever.

It’s the only messaging app I use. Idk why people are opposed to using it, but I’ve gotten a bunch of friends to migrate and once on it, they all enjoy the experience.

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.

Also don't talk about crimes you commit via any messaging app ever.

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

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“Private chat history”

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

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

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

but fb messenger is not e2e encrypted at all. If the company is doing e2e then they can't read your messages

It is if you enable secret messages for a conversation, I believe, but not the default chat mode. In either case people should use other apps.

This is true, FB messenger is as open as it will get with seeing your messages, WhatsApp is dubious too so either Signal or Session are best e2e messenger apps imo.

I have never heard of them, are they social media apps?

The two apps I've mentioned are exclusively messenger apps. Think of Facebooks messenger but more secure with no big company servers looking at your chat and messages.

What the fuck, Facebook?

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

This is 100% true, but also this is less of a Facebook bad issue and more of a state law issue.

Facebook was subpoenaed to provide this info, they didn't willingly hand it over. I'd be interested to see how many lemmings here jumping down the meta bad rabbithole would have the stones to ignore a subpoena lmao.

Well it could have been end to end encrypted leaving no way to turn anything over. It's like turning over someones mail after it has been delivered because you made a copy of everything that came through.

Or, and I know Meta would find this absurd, but maybe don’t collect that data to begin with?!

How… do you think messaging platforms work?

The respectable ones like Signal have nothing to hand over because either it is E2EE or they just don’t profile you at all. If the mom and her daughter had used Signal instead, Signal would’ve complied and only been able to serve the court the metadata.

Facebook neither encrypts the data nor does it only take what’s given to them by the user. There is so much non-consensual data harvesting happening on that platform, that they claim their users agreed to, when no one actually did, since their TOS are such a mess and are constantly being updated.

Why would I compare myself to a multi-billion dollar corporation?

Someone somewhere along the chain of command would have to give the order to ignore the subpoena. That person would presumably be held responsible as an individual, just like you or me.

They could get contempt of court charges and spend time in jail, pretty much arbitrarily long - as long as judge feels

What? You think individuals in corporations are held accountable in the US?

It happens occasionally although you are more or less correct. My state's old governor was the CEO of a company that committed at the time the largest healthcare fraud in US history.

Instead of going to jail he became the governor.

So ya I see your point. I would still of course be hesitant to push my luck and ignore a subpoena. Pushed hard enough, they will get ya. Look at how Epstein was eventually out in jail.

I suppose mainly it's about money and power. It's rare for someone really wealthy to suffer serious consequences. Before Epstein went to prison, he got a ridiculous deal from the guy who was later Trump's Sec of Labor, Acosta, where he had to report to prison each night but was out for 12 hours a day or something... since, you know, his work is so important because he was wealthy.

I'm not sure about individuals, but a company can be sanctioned in various ways for ignoring a subpoena... usually something like being prohibited to operate in a state, or being dissolved. Fairly unlikely that would happen to a company the size of facebook. I guess I'm not sure whether a subpoena like the one in the article is addressed to a corporation in general, a department of the company, or an individual?

Yes, but the lack of legal options is what leads to these types of crimes. The 20 week abortion restriction in Nebraska was already the case prior to Roe being overturned, but has since been changed to 12 weeks. It still highlights the fact that more women are going to be prosecuted for crimes that they wouldn't be committing if they had any legal option.

A bad law is no reason to break the law. If what is said was done- was done…. These women are guilty. Period. There is no argument of “but if Roe wasn’t overturned!” That doesn’t matter. It was. And they broke the law.

It’s sucks we’re in this position because of assholes trying to garner votes from the ignorati, but here we are.

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

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.

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

I do the opposite. Admit to every single thing, keep'em guessing what's true.

Terrible from Facebook. Wow.

This is to be expected from Facebook to be honest. People should drop it despite connections.