2270
Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
2270 points (99.9% liked)
Technology
34978 readers
51 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They had the agency to take care of this for 20 damn weeks into the pregnancy where they were at 100% legally, even disregarding the options we all have to prevent conception in the first place.
On top of that, fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, assuming the pregnant woman doesn't kill it at week 28 using medicine as this one did. I can't help but feel that makes 24 weeks a pretty important deadline for when this sort of choice is more than just about the pregnant woman.
I think that misses the point of this story. The fact is, the government has complete access to your digital communications.
Now let's run this scenario in a state with a zero abortion policy
That's a massive oversimplification of things. Intentionally removing nuance doesn't help people.
Even if the difference is largely academic, the police needed a warrant to get this info from Facebook. This info was not directly government owned and directly available to law enforcement.
Proper opsec and infosec is all about controlling for the threat level of your adversary. If you have nation state level adversaries then yes, you're screwed by simple merit of doing things online where the US government has major internet relays tapped at the source. That isn't the case here and black and white statements just muddy the waters and make proper security feel impossible to the average person. Don't help the powers that be to make you and others feel helpless. That helps no one.
The threat level here was minor. They told the police where to look for evidence.
Beyond that, I'm not personally going to continue into the rabbit hole of the current hellscape post the godawful repeal of Roe v Wade. That situation is absolutely fucked.
As always, don't talk with police, and don't discuss illegal activity unencrypted or connected to your real life identity.
You’re right, and there’s two things going on here, one group of people is debating the morality of what these people did in the first place, but the other take is platform compliance with law enforcement and more generally the government’s ability to access your data.
You’re contrasting that a warrant should not really be a concern compared with the government’s ability to perform truly invasive surveillance potentially without any warrant.
I don’t know that you really disagree with person you’re replying to, though. Yeah, if people are doing something their government classifies as illegal, talking about it on unencrypted spaces where it’s subject to a warrant is dumb.
Very few people would be alarmed when Facebook turns over data related to human traffickers. Some would. But for those who are focused on morality, would it matter if the method was, say, the NSA cracking encryption without a warrant? Or tapping communications through an encryption back door?They’d probably be more worried about admitting the evidence than whether the method should be allowed.
It’s certainly worth considering that if governments are criminalizing behavior people believe ought not to be a crime, they need to be more aware that communication security is a thing and there are methods and tools to help with that, and powers the government have to thwart it. But who the government is going after will make people care about the issue differently.
Thinking about hypotheticals where this plays out in other scenarios doesn’t seem like an oversimplification, it’s a valid consideration, at least for public awareness.