1203
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
1203 points (96.7% liked)
Technology
59577 readers
5913 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Just like IRC, for example.
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.