Unencrypted chat history is a prime target for police

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.

  • SkyNTP@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    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?

  • kevincox@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • MrFagtron9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Facebook doesn’t use e2e.

    There is a private chat e2e feature, but then your chats don’t show up on PC.

  • ghariksforge@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    There is no way for these companies to say no to law enforcement. That is why you should stay away from corporate social media.

  • 0xEmmy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    So either FB isn’t actually E2E, or their implementation is Twitter-grade broken.

  • ezmack@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Regardless of what you think about abortion laws people just gotta come to terms with the fact that your phone and computer are not reliable partners in crime

  • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.