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.
Well, don’t use Facebook to talk about doing things that are illegal. Why do people not use common sense?
Just yesterday here on Lemmy, I mentioned the dangers of violating privacy, and some commenters went on about “what dangers?” Implying there were none…
Is it not enough to gesture broadly?
At this point, they’ll just say “yeah, but these people did a crime. I don’t do crimes so I have nothing to worry about”. The problem with that mentality, I would hope, doesn’t need to be stated.
I stopped trying to change the world.
This is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time and you ain’t getting that data back.
How is this an example of the government turning into a “fascist dictatorship”?
I agree that these people did a crime.
I just don’t think their crime should be illegal.
If this was about murdering a full-grown adult and not aborting a fetus, nobody would be talking about privacy concerns. Guaranteed.
How do you know they committed a crime. After reading the article I don’t know. It looks totally as if it’s possible that she just had a miscarriage.
Maybe there’s just a prosecutor eager for convictions.
Maybe she was trying do avoid exactly this kind of trouble.
She took abortion drugs…
Would you be ok with someone aborting a 39 week old fetus? What about a 40 week old fetus? What about during labour?
Slippery slope fallacy detected
Also, there’s no general agreement or scientific pointing of where life and consciousness is started on a fetus so, if the government job is to conserve the life of a individual, a fetus life still matters and shouldn’t be taken by neither the parents or anyone else.
Brazil (ironically enough) has a good constitution about about abortion where’s it is strictly prohibited unless some cases apply like: the baby has developed no brain, the baby has originated from a sexual assault case or the process of giving birth or the pregnancy itself represents a risk of death for the mother. It is simple, states that life’s have the same values as well as showing the individual rights matter.
Why do you think a life created by sexual assault is less valuable than a life created otherwise? Isn’t the resulting life the same?
Thinking this through might help you understand the tradeoffs behind most abortions. Pregnancy is dangerous, childbirth is dangerous, parenting is incredibly difficult.
A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures. How do you evaluate the harm caused by that against the harm caused by being forced to carry a child produced by sexual assault?
A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures.
A child can also be put up for adoption btw.
Which often means shoving them into massively underfunded institutions, that are full of corruption and abuse, making it a less than ideal alternative.
Less ideal than being dead?
You’re joking, right? First, abortions aren’t mentioned in the Brazilian constitution - you’d have to look at specific legal codices, such as the Civil Code or the Penal Code. Second, that’s the bare minimum, not “pretty good”.
The objective is supposed to be to find the situations where abortion would be fair a fair trade-off of lives and rights, not to try to speedrun the abortion rank; it makes no sense you’re saying it is bare minimum when the objective is to reduce it as it is inherently bad.
No one has anything to hide, until they do
I once heard that “Anyone can be charged with a crime if they can be watched closely enough for long enough.”
To the people shitting on the idea of a default defederation with Meta, how about we deferedate not because it will affect us as posters but because they are evil pieces of shit?
yeah, the difference is pretty stark:
- lemmy: we’ll give you a way to dm anyone on site, but please don’t use that, if you set up an app on this other open source service we’re not affiliated with (which is basically an encrypted discord) we’ll do our best to make it as seamless for you as possible. we’ll keep warning you for your own privacy.
- meta/facebook: aggressively keeps you on-platform for spying purposes; literally killed xmpp a decade ago and they’ll fuckin do it again (if we let them)
They trust me. Dumb fucks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
(yes it sounds like satire but that’s a real quote)
Was it Facebook that killed xmpp or Google? Legitimately asking because I’ve always seen that blamed on Google.
It was Google, they Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished it with Google Chat. Then they killed that themselves.
correction: it was both! fedbook chat also supported xmpp at first, they never federated but you could at least use it with a jabber client. then when they had enough market share they killed it.
fun semi related fact is that whatsapp, at least a couple of years ago, was using modified ejabberd (ie an xmpp server) as the backend - so arguably they helped with EEE too.
The Lemmy DM is imo actually quite important. If I want to get in touch with someone about a post, nothing more. It is an easy option, and serves a purpose. It isn’t imo meant to be used for anything else.
yep, it’s important that we have this capability, but it’s also nice that unlike other platforms that do their best to lock you in, lemmy actively pushes you toward a safer alternative
What’s the name of that safer alternative?
Matrix, which is pretty much an encrypted and open-source Discord clone (at least in the same fashion as Lemmy would be a Reddit clone). I personally use Element to interact with it and have a matrix.org account, but Matrix is just like the fediverse, you can choose any instance or client you want, or even host an instance yourself. In your Lemmy settings you can set up your Matrix user, right below your email address as of 0.18.1, and if you do, a new buttons saying “send secure message” will show up on your profile, next to “send message”, which will redirect people trying to message you to Matrix.
People are getting all upset at Facebook/Meta here but they were served a valid warrant. I don’t think there is much to get mad about them here. The takeaway I get is this:
Avoid giving data to others. No matter how trustworthy they are (not that Meta is) they can be legally compelled to release it. Trust only in cryptography.
There is of course the other question of if abortion being illegal is a policy that most people agree with…but that is a whole different kettle of fish that I won’t get into here.
On one hand - yes Meta followed the legal requirement, but the bigger picture is that people always say “so what it’s <insert deficiency> just don’t do anything illegal”. But that’s only fine when legality matches morality. And the disparity has been growing lately.
Completely right. This is an education issue.
There are several other issues how these two handled this situation.
Court and police records show that police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess after receiving a tip-off that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child given birth to prematurely by Celeste.
Don’t discuss this or involve anyone else.
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.
Why are they even talking to police? Lawyer up, even if the lawyer is free.
(E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
Facebook messenger and text message is the absolute worse way to discuss things like this. They should’ve at least turned on E2EE but they already admitted fault and their devices would’ve been taken away anyway.
They seem like they together. They should’ve just discussed this in person.
Granted, I’m lucky enough never to have been arrested or questioned about a crime. I don’t know how difficult and manipulative interrogations are outside of what I’ve seen on TV. Even still, I’m amazed by and critical of people who talk to the police without a lawyer present.
Even if you think (or know) you’re guilty, that doesn’t mean you should let the system have its way with you.
America is a terrifying church with guns. I pity the citizens.
Every country has the anti-abortion cancer movement and it wouldn’t surprise me if the shit gets more serious here in Europe too with the rise of far right parties. As a matter of fact you have only to look at Poland.
We’ll keep saying that can’t happen here right up until it happens
I’m almost certain that if something like this happened to any fediverse instance - that a local police enforcement would contact the admin and asked for user’s data, which they are required by law to provide or they would go to jail/get a hefty fine and possibly a criminal record, they would do that too. That’s also why E2E is required, to prevent such problems for instance admins - but then again, there’s really nothing you can do against local law, and if it requires that you have to be able to cooperate, well… Then there’s not much the admin can do, without putting himself in a real risk of prosecution, because he is breaking the law by have E2E.
That’s also a good reason to be careful when selecting your home instance, and making sure that you choose one in a country that has all right laws in that regard.
Of course, that’s assuming the police makes contact. I don’t suppose that the admins would be searching through the DMs of people to snitch on them. And if Meta is doing that preemtively and is actively snitching on people - that’s downright evil.
And y’all thought China having your data was something to be afraid of.
Facebook doesn’t use e2e.
There is a private chat e2e feature, but then your chats don’t show up on PC.
Gonna Re-Share this resource… PLEASE forward to individuals who may need it! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access
💀
Meta needs to be destroyed. No organisation, person, or people should hold that much power.
There is no presumption of privacy, especially when you’re the product.
When you oppose the left-wing, you’re defending this.
So either FB isn’t actually E2E, or their implementation is Twitter-grade broken.
Who said facebooks private chat would be e2e?
There is no way for these companies to say no to law enforcement. That is why you should stay away from corporate social media.
