Facebook gives data to Nebraska police prosecuting teenager for abortion
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Also "The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion" (90+ comments)
You cannot be forced to give data you do not posess, which is why end-to-end encryption is a thing
I fucking hate apple but the model they're taking is to take reasonable steps to frustrate state level actors (minus the CP photo upload thing) and as such have set a standard that needs to be followed.
Apple has done a wonderful job marketing something that doesn’t Turkey exist.
Can't really openly sell it the same way if you are supposed to be E2E ..
And it's not like open-source is a panacea either, for most people who will not build it themselves you usually can't really know what is deployed/distributed.
Was going to use Element as an example but on F-droid the app is built and signed by the platform and an archive with sources is distributed.
But last I check the same can't be said for the play store and you have no idea what's running on app.element.io and there is an open issue for reproducible build for the electron app.
But at each step you are gaining something it's not "only a thing ...".
What do we want Facebook to do - not obey the law?
Boulevard media newspapers had the same issue, but you could read like 1 or 2 headlines a day while now it's 50 just on the HN frontpage.
Most context is then found in the article itself, often directly contradicting the headline or revealing how it was carefully designed to produce a click without making a false claim.
Most people will just read the headline without clicking anyway and be emotionally riled up due to its implication. It's really dangerous in an information society.
Often not even written by the author of the post either but by sub-editors who somehow have the responsibility. Being click driven is one motivation, being a political advocate might be another. Serious problem indeed
Implement end-to-end encryption, so they cannot read or hand over private communication in the first place.
Furthermore, looking at legislation coming out of the EU, which places interoperability between services as a key element of anti-monopolisation, it may well soon be impossible for any social network to implement end-to-end encryption and stay compliant.
Our problem is that we have failed to defend big tech, against big govt having fallen for the 'big tech bad' narrative and now we may well reap what we sow.
Who is the sender / recipient? How much data is provided about these actors, phone number, email etc? Is this encrypted?
I don't see big tech as a victim here. Companies like Google and Facebook refused to implement e2ee when they had the opportunity. Their network effects and infinite money pots helped to keep more privacy-respecting options small. We failed to defend privacy against big tech and govt overreach.
this optimal scenario was never in our grasp, and even if it were, we missed the opportunity when it mattered. Our task from 2014 onward was to balance big tech vs big govt against each other and make sure neither had too much power over the other. Instead, what we have now is big govt, turning big tech, into another lever of state control
Public key cryptography has existed for decades now. With regards to your claim, the opposite is true: it's absolutely impossible to implement true and serious end-to-end cryptography and not be compliant with interoperability standards.
That being said, in this situation, e2e would probably change nothing, because governments would likely mandate a backdoor for search warrants, and this particular case was not a fishing expedition since there was a probable cause.
> Our problem is that we have failed to defend big tech, against big govt having fallen for the 'big tech bad' narrative and now we may well reap what we sow.
Big tech doesn't need defending. The truth is that big-tech and big-govt is a much more likely alliance than big-tech and the consumer.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
They willingly self-censor and preserve these unsafe systems so that they don’t get retaliated against by the state regulatory apparatus.
Apple and Facebook aren’t dumb, they know all about E2EE. So does the FBI.
They are simply not allowed to close these security holes. No amount of money or commercial success lets you disobey the wishes of the FBI in America.
Stop obsessively collecting every tiny bit of data, so they have nothing to give to the police in a case like this. They just harmed a teenager for profit.
Meta also seems to have taken zero lessons (e.g. minimizing their access to the data they were asked to provide) from this incident. They not only don't want to avoid something like this happening in the future, they also don't want to avoid being put in a position where they would have to participate in something like this again.
That said, being German, I find it deeply painful to hear people posit that not following orders is unreasonable and impossible, especially when even in their own country the majority of people disagrees with the laws in question. If big corporations with expensive legal departments can't be expected to find creative ways to comply with the bare minimum of a law that harms the users who entrust them with their data, maybe it's the corporations who are the problem.
So for one I'd like them to continue that practise but for ethical reasons. It doesn't seem like the biggest ask.
Let's turn up the knob a bit, what if Facebook existed in Germany during the Holocaust and doxxed Jews and other political targets, would you maintain this same argument? Probably not.
Why does the US criminal system do this? Who at the court gets to decide that 17 is the same as 21 in this case?
It's not like the age of "adulthood" is some fixed number and if you're 17 years, 364 days old you're not an adult.
For example, places without Romeo and Juliet laws punish couples where one is barely adult for sleeping with someone who is nearly an adult. Young couples are also regularly charged with manufacturing/possession/distribution of child pornography in those cases too. And people also aren’t getting to buy alcohol when they are 20-years-and-364-days-old either, etc.
There is a lot where the system treats adulthood and rights as a black and white thing, yet grey when someone wants to make an example out of a child.
Being charged as a minor is usually because one assumes minor lack the judgement of adults and it makes more sense to focus on rehabilitation for young offenders.
But if a young offender clearly acted with premeditated malice then they can be treated as an adult.
how does that sentence mesh with:
> But if a young offender clearly acted with premeditated malice
How would you be able to determine if a certain case is a result of the incomplete development of the child's brain/mind, versus a 'clear premeditated malice' ?
If a minor acted with 'clear premeditated malice', couldn't you always argue that that in itself is a result of the fact that a minor's brain/mind isn't fully developed yet? And was unable to oversee the results of their actions?
I understand that sometimes teenagers can look very adult-like, but even if their brains would be fully developed they still lack experience, might still be very hormonal, and are interacting with other undeveloped teenagers on a daily basis.
You probably yourself know that however adult you felt like when you were 17, you probably were not.
As far as I know we've all agreed upon an age where an child turns into an adult, so I can't wrap my head around why judges would seemingly willy-nilly allow kids to be tried as adults.
IDK if you're knowledgeable about this; do they perform assessments off the child's development at all? maybe by a developmental psychologist or something? Or is it really up to the judge?
<Editorial>This being the US, there seems to be a tendency to increasingly try more cases in full criminal court because it is perceived as harsher or stricter. I suspect this may be a perverse outcome of the politicisation and moralisation of criminal justice in the US.</Editorial>
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_as_an_adult#United_State...
I am not aware of Facebook claims to encrypt user data. Quite the opposite I would assume any information I transfer using Facebook/Google/Apple is semi public.
This is a lot like liberals complaining about "political ideologies" from a position steeped in a specific political ideology (i.e. neoliberalism) that is so commonplace as to have become as invisible to them as the air they breathe. Just because you don't write a manifesto about it or fit an exact archetype to the tee that doesn't mean your actions are politically or ethically neutral. Unless Facebook's decisions are literally decided by an unbiased random number generator, they follow one leaning or another, as conflicted, incomprehensible and incoherent as it may be.
Texas's law lets people sue each other for those acts and usually you can sue someone in one state under that state's laws and expect the judgement to be enforced in other states
Plenty of states have now passed such laws to try to ban abortion.
Whether they are enforceable will end up with SCOTUS. But SCOTUS is the same institution that reversed Roe vs Wade. So I would not expect them to take a practical or precedent based approach to the question "can I go to a blue state to get an abortion if I am pregnant in a red state"...
The answer is overwhelmingly "no". It is not legal to gamble in most jurisdictions, but noone is persecuted for going to casino in an area where those are allowed.
Google continuously skirts GDPR and other data privacy laws, but when it comes to sharing private messaging information there is nothing they could have done?
While I agree that they probably had to comply, coldly explaining away an act many see as immoral as "it's the law" isn't helping the conversation. Sure it's the law, but the US a history of immoral laws that have been repealed only after someone took a stand and broke them.
edit: it's -> isn't
What makes 24 weeks the magic number for abortions? What's the difference between 24 and 25 weeks, in terms of fetus development? Why draw the line there, and not at 24.5 weeks? Or 23 weeks?
The relevant and superior opinion you're holding is just an arbitrary number.
Your subjective opinion (or mine for that matter) is not relevant to someone else’s situation.
It also allows commenters on websites to go “Ackchyually, …”, purposely ignoring the de facto legal situation, focusing on the de jure fiction instead.
https://www.bmfsfj.de/bmfsfj/themen/familie/schwangerschaft-...
That's why using a service which doesn't give the service provider access to the messages is crucial for privacy.
Facebook could very well analyse only public data and not private conversations, using the private conversation as a feature to keep users on the platform.
As it is, none of its offering offer secure messaging - which is understandable: 99% of their users don't care until they're in jail.
[0] - https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/abortion...
Besides, the practicality of going elsewhere for abortion is a huge Q. For most people arguing for it, it's only a mental exercise. But we once tried to replace prescription glasses my wife left at home while on a trip in the UK. It's effectively impossible, don't tell me you can just walk to a clinic being a foreign national with no residence in the UK and ask NHS for abortion.
>> Abortion is legal on request up to 24 weeks, and is legal beyond 24 weeks with the approval of two doctors.
>> It is illegal to protest within 150 metres of an abortion clinic.
At an estimated 23 weeks, her abortion would have been legal in all the light-pink states in this chart: https://www.axios.com/2022/05/14/abortion-state-laws-bans-ro...
Friendly reminder that she is accused, not convicted. She's also a minor, and likely living in poverty. Also, they allegedly discussed burning the fetus, but did not do so. Maybe temper your moral outage in light of those facts?
You know what's inhuman? Making birth control and abortion as difficult as possible for poor folks to keep them in poverty so they make for easily-exploited worker-bees. The mother claims assets of $400. The child has no assets. Their county has an average individual income of $23,000/year.
Here's a thought: if abortion outrages you, then heavily support contraceptive access and sex education. But...guess what the anti-abortion crowd are also vehemently against?
What's clear is that the police had little evidence of a crime from an autopsy that showed the fetus had never breathed air, but still dug anyway - "we found it in a plastic bag so we had to make REALLY sure it wasn't suffocated" strains credulity. They went out of their way to try and fuck over a teenager living in poverty.
Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-face...
As for "inhuman", that's your opinion, friend. I really don't find myself getting morally outraged over it.
what on Earth are you talking about? The most commmon "at will" limit in Europe is 12 weeks. The ONLY countries with more than 17 weeks gestrational limit is the Netherlands, Sweden. The UK, Chezhia, and Finland do not even legally have "at will" abortions, which might differ in practise. So while we can say that MAYBE UK is 20+ weeks that is still the ONLY country in Europe.