Facebook and Google hand over user data, help police prosecute abortion seekers | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Google hand over user data, help police prosecute abortion seekers

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234 pointsmanwithaplan187 comments

Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

Unless they change the laws and suddenly you have something to hide.

This echoes my sentiment perfectly.

Discussions on surveillance and misinformation often involve people advocating for granting more power to the government to prosecute who they believe violate their value system, unless the value system somehow changes and now you become the criminal. As an example, this is why breaking E2EE with backdoors to stop pedophilia, revoking immunity to social platforms for users' speech and the like are bad ideas - some day your values will become abhorrent, and the same tools that you used against others will be used against you.

I remember when Schmidt came out with this line thinking the same thing.

But back then it seemed like a distant and improbable scenario - I objected to his statement more on point of principle than out of any realistic sense that it was things were going to get that bad in the near future.

Turns out they did.

(before anyone says it - yeah. Back then there were probably already enough examples of law enforcement overreach - not to mention the decades-long injustice of the "war on drugs". I need to learn to be more cynical)

> But back then it seemed like a distant and improbable scenario

I am trying to understand this perspective. I was there and nothing seemed improbable or remote. The remoteness was merely a function of technical & economic conditions. Historic precedents, domestic and foreign, past or near present, all pointed the same direction, underlining high probabilities.

Pessimism is rarely the correct inclination, with the exception of questions concerning freedom, power, security, and control. It is appropriately rational to question and highlight worst case outcomes in such cases.

This same pattern is happening yet again ('surprise!') with generative AI. Maybe it is necessary to assure that 'yes, this technology is very cool' as red flags are raised.

It is a very simple thought, backed by unassailable historic evidence: Humans enjoy lording it over other human beings. We should never create systems that permit a tiny tiny subset to realize such base desires. A very simple idea, truly.

I think I framed it at the time as requiring some "V For Vendetta"-esque takeover of democracy. (which in itself no longer seems to remote).

But I now see that things don't need to get comic-book bad for Schmidt's statement to be dangerously wrong.

Along the lines of surveillance I heard this one:

When you pass mass surveillance laws you are trusting the people in power now, but also the future people in power.

This framing can make you think about many laws differently.

Yep. Too many people design systems (both technical and otherwise) under the assumption 'their team' will always be in control, and it'll be their enemies who suffer.

Or that hey, this power will never be abused because the system won't allow it, and those in control will always have our best interests in mind.

Don't collect more data than you have to, limit the power of any systems you implement, and always design things under the assumption your enemies will take control of it in future.

>Don't collect more data than you have to, limit the power of any systems you implement

That is basically the opposite of what these companies do, and their business models rely it.

Some people realize we live in a surveillance dystopia with corrupt government, and others have not yet realized it.

> Don't collect more data than you have to, limit the power of any systems you implement, and always design things under the assumption your enemies will take control of it in future.

This is great advice if you want to design Good systems, but under barely-regulated capitalism, those who design Good systems will be out-competed and put out of business by those who design Profitable systems :(

I have nothing to hide, beyond a bit of casual piracy, at least until laws change significantly, but people I care about might.

My distaste for corporate stalking is, if I'm perfectly honest, at least partly selfish feelings of discomfort in losing what privacy I still have, but it is mostly concern for what some will use information about others to enforce.

Is the issue that Meta and Google comply with the law(turning in the data to crime investigators), or that the law itself is medieval? I mean, both are concerning in their own way. But the latter seems like a much much bigger problem.

> comply with the law

What concerns you about this?

Because they are good laws and bas laws, so some requests shouldn't be given in too easily.

I’m not comfortable living in a world where FB and Google get to decide what laws are worth following.

Who decides which laws are bad?

The ideology of the OP usually.

The courts, and there’s precedent saying a companies can petition the courts to review the law before handing over data.

And given Google et.al. actions in other avenues against these laws, it’s sad they aren’t challenging them.

Right, which is your second point about the law existing being the concern.

Companies are simply enforcing the law, right or wrong.

Companies should not enforce laws. They should just follow them.

Except in this case, they are doing both. To not do what you're asking (not turn over data on abortion seekers), they would be breaking the law if they received a valid warrant.

Now... They could comply with the law by not hoovering up as much data as they do, thereby becoming useless to both advertiser and law enforcement alike....

But that jeopardizes their business model.

No they couldn't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention

https://edri.org/our-work/a-beginners-guide-to-eu-rules-on-s...

The companies profit from this data, but at this point they no longer have a choice: they have to collect the data or stop offering services in a lot of geographical areas. The point that they can avoid it by not collecting it was valid some 15 years ago, but no longer.

One of the main objections of companies is, by the way, that most governments refuse to pay the sometimes extensive development and infrastructure costs for this, instead just threatening the companies with (often illegal) measure to force their compliance.

Turning over data as required by law/warrant is not enforcing a law. It's following the law.

Companies don't get a choice. The "out" some companies are using is to encrypt everything with keys only on the customer's device. They then provide all data they have, as ordered, on request. This, of course, does not include the encryption key. However, as far as I know essentially only Signal does it these days.

Whatsapp is famous for doing this before, and then Facebook killing this for "regulatory concerns". I don't know for sure, but the previous owner of Whatsapp and founder of Signal implied that Facebook got threatened by states into doing that.

But FB/Google/Amazon/... are the tip of the iceberg. The companies really used for "enforcing the laws" (and for using very harsh measures against individuals just to make some government department's job a little bit easier) are banks.

https://www.taxsamaritan.com/tax-article-blog/reasons-the-ir...

(note the wording here: "the IRS has full authority to". They can do this at will. This process has been used to cause problems for political opponents as well. Nobody seems to care)

There is no inherent moral good in enforcing the law. Enforcing a morally evil law is morally evil.

The second part is true, the first part not so much. Enforcing the law creates stability, which is a good trait in and of itself, (all things considered equal otherwise about the law in question)

You have some arguments for that I'm not aware of perhaps?

> Enforcing the law creates stability ...

Do no obvious counter-examples spring to mind for you regarding that? ;)

The only concerning thing to me is when tech companies volunteer information to LEO. They should at least demand a warrant.

First came the data, then came the law.

That is the problem: we have nothing to hide until someone changes the law. Suddenly those things that were legal yesterday become the crimes of today.

Are laws being retroactively applied or since the date the law came into effect, plus some grace period ?

The data was generated, the law changed and law enforcement asked for all user data. There is nothing retroactive here.

There is no respect for the context in which the data was generated.

From the point of view of the company for who it is just a pot of data with no context until analysed, maybe.

It will sure seem retroactive to someone who might have acted differently so the data wouldn't be available to be handed over, if the current laws were in action at the point they could have done something to avoid the data being collected¹².

[1] "Generated" is too benign a word here IMO, hence using "collected" instead

[2] "inferred" might be a better choice as the data could be incorrect³ but that still seems to imply less agency than the companies have in their very deliberate stalky behaviour

[3] so something made up, not a truth collected

I used "generated" viewed from the user, "collected" would be from the perspective of the company. I wonder whether there is a legal difference in the case of law changes, which date would be taken?

The classic form of retroactive application of laws would be if someone performed an action, the law was backdated so that action becomes illegal and the performer becomes a criminal.

In this case we're talking not about direct action as the action is implied via the data collected. So if the action was performed before the backdating of the law but the data was collected after the backdating, is the performer a criminal?

So from the data, an action is "inferred".

It's a good question actually. The law was on the books but not being enforced because of Roe. But then the supreme court says Roe doesn't apply and law is fine as-is. Isn't this legally different from an ex-post-facto law?

Unclear: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/81342/can-abortion-l...

> That is the problem: we have nothing to hide until someone changes the law.

As it happens the Dutch authorities were pretty good with collecting ethnicity and confessional data in the inter-war period, then the very bad guys came along and we know what followed.

Data collection at scale and especially data centralization has always been a mistake, too bad many of the livelihoods of us here depend on exactly that.

Maybe employers and schools should stop collecting diversity data in case a less inclusive nation invades the United States.

In the US’s case I don’t think it would take an invasion to put people’s lives at risk because of innocuous (at the time) data collection on sensitive societal issues. This article is just proof of that.

the only good data is the data that isn't collected.

> First came the data

And as their data was harvested, consumers were told: Relinquish your private data to us, it's a fine and normal thing to do, we are trustworthy corporate citizens and privacy is a concern expressed only by those who wear hats of tinfoil.

Nothing really. Here is the list of this ethnic people you want to eliminate in conformance with the law you just passed on mandatory abortion and sterilization, oh my great overlord. Congratulations for your successful putsch by the way.

As long as there is diversity of people and jurisdictions the law will vary from place to place.

What is legal and acceptable in one place is illegal and abhorrent elsewhere.

Until we have a homogenous global population and one world government there will be laws you disagree with and wont want enforced.

Edit: Genuinely confused by the downvotes here. Anyone care to take the time to explain?

> As long as there is diversity of people and jurisdictions the law will vary from place to place.

You forgot from time to time. Abortion was legal in all of these places 1 year ago.

Yes, that too.

Social mores and laws can change pretty quickly, in decades.

I think this issue is that we are giving these companies the ability to reveal sensitive information about us.

We should rethink how we share our data and the costs that it has.

I don't think Meta and Google are to blame here. Other than encouraging us to give them our data unprotected (as well as trying to syphon up as much as they can get their hands on in the background).

> I don't think Meta and Google are to blame here. Other than encouraging us to give them our data unprotected (as well as trying to syphon up as much as they can get their hands on in the background).

That bracketed "as well as" is a 'king huge "other than".

Even your smaller "other than" that is stated as such, is enough to make the premise that they carry no blame seem pretty silly to me.

Yes. But the bracketed part doesn't apply to this article IIUC because it is talking about chat logs which were "consciously" given. If the article was talking about web history assembled by ad tracking scripts than I can definitely agree that Meta and Google have a large portion of the blame.

Both.

Both are problems, but naive people expect Google and Facebook to do differently. Google has always been intertwined with the government, and Facebook was absorbed early on. I am not denigrating people by using the word naive. Those who are most naive need protection and knowledge. More tyrannical/medieval rule seems to be trending.

This comment is a fantastic example of the meta-battle which the tech industry has been waging. They have worked very hard to change the very questions in the privacy debate. In their terms, collection of the data itself is never under debate; all debates are framed in terms of how they are allowed to use data. In this case, the failure isn't the law or the company's compliance with it. It was the collection and retention of the data in the first place.

>Facebook and Google comply with the law. >When presented with a valid warrant they hand over the data requested.

The article seems to imply that the big social media companies should selectively comply with a valid warrant based on what crime the accused has committed.

I think you should either have problem with the entire procedure or agree that the procedure is valid.

> The article seems to imply that the big social media companies should selectively comply with a valid warrant

They already selectively comply: "According to internal statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time".

I’m sure you’re aware, but there’s pretty obviously a huge difference between the police requesting info because they want to make an arrest and any other government branch asking Meta for data on anything else. My guess is Meta’s cooperation rate with police would be much higher than 70%.

Purely opinion, but I'm sure a non-trivial amount of government requests for user data are invalid, warrantless, or unfulfillable (contains incorrect information).

> As we have said in prior reports, we always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid, no matter which government makes the request. We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so.

(But) they seem to apply legal discretion on which to follow, which is mostly expected. When Meta receives a request/warrant they must use their judgement to determine whether it's legal or not.

> only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us

Given their track record, it's frightening that we're depending on the "good-faith belief" of Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Google to make such legal decisions that affect people's lives.

But I suppose the alternative could be even worse, where they comply with any and all government requests for data, regardless of legal validity and requirement.

You might be surprised, 70% compliance is fairly low. For comparison, Apple complies with ~90%: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

That says nothing about warrants.

And the other 30% is unknown so we can’t say they selectively comply. It’s quite possible the other 30% are invalid warrants, in which case there’s nothing to comply with.

Social media companies can't decide that a warrant is "invalid". Only a court can decide that.

From the article:

> Goldman indicated examples where internet services affirmatively go to court to protect user interest, "but those are the exceptions." "There's thousands of requests for every one of those cases"

> Social media companies can't decide that a warrant is "invalid". Only a court can decide that.

They can, however, decide “this is worth pushing back against” vs “this is not worth pushing back against” - that 30% represents the number of times that Meta’s lawyers believed it was worth pushing back and they were proved correct

Well 100% is more than 70%. So we can if we want to assume that means 100%

A much more informative statement would be:

"We turn down about 25% of all requests"

For me, the takeaway is that they collect and persist too much personalized data about users, and it's a shame that people only start caring when it affects abortion access.

Now, Google, to their credit, claims[1] they now purge information about users who visit abortion clinics or related places, but ... that isn't very reassuring. Even if they excise some related portion of user data, they still have enough other data to figure it out once law enforcement has access -- and there's more stuff the law would be after than just abortion! You'd be expecting Google to play whack-a-mole with every latest "activity that needs protection"!

But yes, you're correct, it's far too late to identify what Google's doing wrong after abortion is illegal, and after Google has that data about you, and after they're served with a warrant on that basis.

[1] This article https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/18/google-workers-sign-p...

which cites this blog post: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/protecting-pe...

User chat logs and search history released by social media companies to police can be used to prosecute people for abortion, even when they are being investigated for other reasons.

> User chat logs and search history released by social media companies to police can be used to prosecute people for abortion, even when they are being investigated for other reasons.

Firstly, can you even prosecute a woman for abortion? Aren't they legal?

Secondly, if the abortion is illegal, it's not unusual for the state to prosecute someone when the investigation of that person reveals other crimes.

What would you propose instead? That any evidence of secondary criminal activity uncovered during an investigation of the primary activity be ignored?

> Firstly, can you even prosecute a woman for abortion? Aren't they legal?

In case you've been living under a rock for the last while: several American states have banned abortions[0][1] after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. The federal government failed to implement any laws to safeguard access to abortions so overturning Roe vs Wade was all that conservatives needed.

Some states have exceptions for rape and incest, some don't. Texas even offers a sizeable bounty for reporting abortions. This has already resulted in medical care being refused to women carrying stillborn children and other pregnancy complications fatal to either the mother or the child out of fear of prosecution.

As for secondary criminal activity: I agree, if the police finds other illegal acts during a legal investigation, they should be allowed to act on that. This is the proof that the whole "if you've got nothing to hide" narrative surrounding state surveillance is dangerous.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-ro...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law_in_the_United_Sta...

> In case you've been living under a rock for the last while:

It might surprise you, but people who don't live in America probably don't follow, nor care about the politics going on in specific states.

Seems to be weird to roll into the comment section if you don't follow this, nor care.

This was a big thing my dude. Coverage from all angles in multiple countries outside the us.

Then they should perhaps read up on the situation before commenting? Like, this is the first sentence in the article we're discussing:

> As abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced (...)

So claiming ignorance is not a valid point.

This ceases to be a valid excuse when those people then jump into the middle of a discussion exclusively about laws and politics in the US.

> I agree, if the police finds other illegal acts during a legal investigation, they should be allowed to act on that.

I'm not sure this principle is a good one. Almost everyone had probably broken a law or two (yes, this meane there are too many bad laws, let me know if youve an idea of how to solve that), so by investigating someone for some random thing they haven't done you've got a good chance of finding something. This de facto gives imprisonment powers to the police and prosecutors office, giving plenty of opportunity for corruption.

> I'm not sure this principle is a good one. Almost everyone had probably broken a law or two (yes, this meane there are too many bad laws, let me know if youve an idea of how to solve that), so by investigating someone for some random thing they haven't done you've got a good chance of finding something. This de facto gives imprisonment powers to the police and prosecutors office, giving plenty of opportunity for corruption.

Well, that's not going to work out well - LEOs investigating a shoplifter should just ignore the corpse lying in the backyard?

It's just no going to fly - crimes are crimes, and if you want a crime to be not-a-crime then follow the legal process in your jurisdiction to make it so.

>yes, this meane there are too many bad laws, let me know if youve an idea of how to solve that)

I, in fact, do. All laws come with baked in sunset dates. No exceptions. Furthermore, it's clear there is a need for some sort of secondary legislature or sub committee of the primary dedicated to the repeal of bad law. Then again, if that worked, we wouldn't necessarily be in the problem we're in.

> I, in fact, do. All laws come with baked in sunset dates. No exceptions.

The problem with this, I imagine, is that when the sunset dates comes around, and a new political party is in control, they will let the new law lapse and laws will be ping logging back in forth given they even get the votes to go back in effect.

This would be terrible for very important laws like the Civil Rights Act.

Do we put a sunset date on the bill of rights?

What’s the sunset date on these abortion bans? Is it more than 9 months? Is there any reason to believe they will be repealed at their sunset date? How long do we tolerate the injustice? What do you tell the woman who wants an abortion today?

Bad laws aren’t a mechanical problem. They’re a people problem. Repealing law is something the current legislatures are perfectly capable of. The hard part of repealing “bad law” is defining “bad”. A secondary repeal committee would have the same difficulty as our existing legislature.

If you don’t like a law then go do something to change it. In case you doubt the feasibility of this recall that is exactly what happened with abortion.

You should do the bare minimum to familiarize yourself before wading in to this particular topic.

Abortion legality varies by state in the US. This is a recent development.

I wouldn’t expect to be prosecuted, or even investigated, for typing “how people get away with bank robbery” into Google. Or for watching The Dark Knight.

> You should do the bare minimum to familiarize yourself before wading in to this particular topic.

I did, and my understanding is that any secondary crimes uncovered during an investigation of a crime can be pursued.

What about that do you disagree with?

> Firstly, can you even prosecute a woman for abortion? Aren't they legal?

This part.

In the USA, abortions are now illegal in many states. This was a major change that took place last year.

Is this real? This sounds like a weird trip back into medieval times. Who is the head of that modern Inquisition?

What sounds like a trip into medieval times? Government control over corporations? Corporation oversight over private lives? Isn’t that what the new generation of enlightened and progressive people wanted?

But wait, isn't that what was happening in medieval times: the church ruled over the peasants, the kings ruled over the states and everyone was happy living in a liberal and free world - well at least they believed that.

http://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2013/02/decentralization-...

Relatively more liberal than the Roman era and more decentralized than our current era.

That was the theory; in practice, the very limited communication (hard to handle fast-evolving situations when couriers from Rome to Amiens take a few weeks at best) & enforcement means (you have 100 guys with spears? We are 200 with pitchforks, come get us) led to a much more decentralized power structure than what is stereotypically understood.

We did it. We made the dystopia

Under His eye.

The only take away from this article is that somehow they could read the change logs.

Doesn't that fly in the face of metas own claims to not be able to?

BI seems to be implying that abortion shouldn't be treated as a crime in places where it is a crime.

WhatsApp is supposedly end to end encrypted. Does Meta claim anything similar about its other platforms?

Is it really? I always assumed it was like Zoom end to end encryption where one of the “ends” is a Facebook data center. How can a user prove the claim of end to end encryption?

There was a bit of a song and dance when Whatsapp adopted the Signal protocol. Certainly if you choose not to back up your Whatsapp messages, your old messages aren't available when you switch phones.

If they're not end-to-end encrypted, they're engaging in a lot of deception to indicate that they are.

They are if you enable encryption (with your own key, of course). The default backups are insecure, though.

Except you provide the key to the app and the app is controlled by FB. There’s really no way to prove the key stays on your device. Or that your messages aren’t just forwarded without encryption to a FB datacenter.

Thanks, I don’t have much experience with WhatsApp. I don’t have a lot of faith in Facebook. Especially post-Snowden.

If you think you need E2EE you can really only achieve that on an open system you control and have intimate knowledge of. You can’t trust precompiled binaries.

Something something trusting trust.

This isn’t a problem technology can solve. Women shouldn’t need to be information security experts just to ask questions about their own bodies.

> Especially post-Snowden.

What does Snowden have to do with Facebook? I'm asking in good faith.

Facebook was wrapped up in PRISM.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

What exactly do you mean by wrapped up in PRISM? My understanding is FB like everyone else is legally obligated to comply with FISA demands?

Almost all of WhatsApp has been E2EE for years, based on the same protocol Signal uses. This goes for text messages (personal and groups) and calls. Cloud backups are not encrypted by default, but encryption can be enabled.

WhatsApp doesn't have an open source client so verification is difficult. However, if someone were able to break the encryption, I'm sure it'd be in the headlines of most newspapers.

One exception is WhatsApp business: I don't know the details, but Facebook offers a service where they will do some chat automation for your business which means they must receive the keys.

In terms of security: key changes are automatically accepted. They are hidden by default, but by toggling a setting every time a user updates their keys, a message will be introduced into the chat. QR code key validation has been in the app for years now, though I doubt many users are using the feature.

How do you tell the difference between true E2EE and Zoom E2EE where FB decrypts the message in the middle? Or otherwise backdoors the exchange, perhaps outside the Signal protocol? Ultimately you are trusting Facebook to tell the truth here.

You read the bloody code, and you run the infrastructure. Not your hardware, not your system. There is no alternative.

> how can a user (without deep technical knowledge and skills) prove the claim of end to end encryption?

Checking to see if investigations include evidence from messages on these platforms excepting:

Messages sent by the user to someone who distributes them further

Or investigators getting control of the phone.

---

WhatsApp stands up to that test.

Except, parallel construction is a thing; jealously guarded by law enforcement as well.

E2E encrypted doesn't mean they don't know who is messaging whom. If there is suspicious contact, can they request who contacted a pharmacy? Then they can ask the pharmacy why so-and-so contacted them.

A better option would be something like Briar which hides IPs via Tor.

> BI seems to be implying that abortion shouldn't be treated as a crime in places where it is a crime.

Abortion was explicitly legally protected for 50 years and only became a crime in some localities last year. There aren't many "crimes" like that.

Slavery was once legal everywhere until it wasn't. It became illegal in some parts of the country but eventually it became illegal everywhere. Now we can look back and think how obvious it is that slavery is wrong.

Murdering the unborn was once legal everywhere until it wasn't. It became illegal in some parts of the country and will eventually become illegal everywhere. One day we will look back and think how obvious it is that murdering the unborn is wrong.

You're missing the point. The transition from legal slavery to illegal slavery was not a smooth one. Consensus did not magically arise. People did not simply relent to legal authorities. There was a massively bloody Civil War fought over it. Regardless of what you think about how "One day we will look back" (and note how Confederate pride is still a thing today), you can't expect this to be like an ordinary legal issue. The transition is extremely divisive, and there will be resistance. Nobody could be neutral during the Civil War, and it's going to be difficult for corporations to remain neutral now, when they want pro-choice people to use their services. Abortion is legal in the headquarter state of the big tech companies, and those companies employ many pro-choice workers.

Technically it was illegal the whole time in many places and the supreme court only last year recognized that they never had the power to prevent states from enforcing their own laws on the matter.

In states where it was illegal it may not even be ex-post-facto for them to prosecute for events that took place prior to last year's supreme court ruling.

Anyway, the real takeaway should be that businesses should not be collecting this kind of data in the first place. If they don't collect it, then they have nothing to turn over.

> Technically it was illegal the whole time in many places and the supreme court only last year recognized that they never had the power to prevent states from enforcing their own laws on the matter.

I don't agree with this "technical" interpretation at all. Nobody would have said in 2020 that technically abortion is illegal in many places. Just because the Supreme Court changed its mind doesn't wipe everyone else's minds.

It doesn't matter what you agree with. Plenty of legal scholars said exactly that, so you're wrong.

Roe ruled that certain state laws criminalizing abortion could not be enforced. But Roe's ruling was found to be unconstitutional and invalid. It was invalid the day Roe was ruled, not the day it was overruled.

Those same states laws criminalizing abortion, which were on the books before Roe and are still on the books, were always legal and enforceable because Roe never was. That is what the court determined last year.

> Plenty of legal scholars said exactly that, so you're wrong.

LOL. What exactly, numerically, does "Plenty" mean, and how does it compare to "all"? Of course, both the majority and minority of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs opinion are legal scholars, but they disagreed vehemently with each other.

Your response sounds very Orwellian to me. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

And then when the supreme court changes their mind again, it will always have been like that too...

We have always been at war with Oceania.

IMO the most realistic way to improve this situation is to get more people using E2EE chat apps, and fight against any attempt by government to weaken or ban encryption.

Meta the company hates this and is spending money on ads trying to get people to use WhatsApp with end to end encryption for things like this.

Even with E2EE doesn't META know who is messaging who on Whatsapp? This doesn't seem completely secure. Briar is distributed and uses Tor to hide user IPs.

Yes, but it's not realistic to believe people will use apps like Briar. The user experience is not good enough.

Although it probably sucks for the individuals at the receiving end of the scales of justice I believe this is an important public education campaign which will hopefully raise awareness of the scale and extent of data collection.

There seems to be a disconnect between data being collected from a terminal, how rich that data can be, and what it can be used for. If you use a digital keyboard your every keystroke can, and probably is being logged - we used to call this spyware, now even the keyboard app on your phone has clipboard sync (and it's built into Windows too!).

People need to be aware for example when activating javascript (and most don't know what that is), how much the various APIs are collecting and storing, which is used to build a "fingerprint" of your device.

The web (and digital devices in general) is actively hostile, anyone who uses noscript can attest to that and anyone who goes onto any news media website and opens "network" via web dev console can see how much data is flying to god knows where to do god knows what.

If you want to defy the state you need to be a master spy, this means actually thinking how you research, and probably learning a thing or two from Snowden (are you on wifi? open hotspot? is your device logging anything, if so, what? do you need to destroy the device afterwards incase it gets forensically inspected? If you could read /var/log what would be there and would it reveal anything about your situation? If you can't read /var/log then your device is actively hostile and not worth the risk).

Privacy is effort, and, in these cases, the 'seekers' are not spending enough effort on hiding their tracks and they are like fish in shallow water, easy pickings.

The ones who are clued up are not the ones who end up making the press, because they know exactly how to cover their tracks, and make it impossible to prove or disprove a fact, which, thankfully at least at this moment, is how justice works (for the most part).

> We do not provide governments with 'back doors' to people's information.

PRISM?

Serious question. I thought that was still a thing.

Is this unexpected? Of course, they follow warrants, why wouldn’t they?

Because they didn't support E2EE and homomorphic encryption.

They never claimed that they support E2EE...

The users signed the EULA and know what their rights are.

That did actually surprise me, I thought Facebook took on WhatsApp/insta messaging which is encrypted?

The Techcrunch article[1] (linked in TFA) mentions FB Messenger was used, which does not have E2EE.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/27/digital-data-roe-wade-repr...

Tragically enough, Facebook Messenger does actually support E2EE. However, it needs to be enabled per contact/chat. Facebook's bad UX may just have become a driving force behind the conviction.

Facebook is improving E2EE according to their blog: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/expanding-features-for-end...

"An investigation by ProPublica found online pharmacies that sell abortion medication such as mifepristone and misoprostol are sharing sensitive data, including users' web addresses, relative location, and search data, with Google and other third-party sites — which allows the data to be recoverable through law enforcement requests."

"we also know that social media isn't likely to stand up to illegitimate law enforcement requests, because of the fact that they fear their own liability, or because of the fact that it's just too costly to stand up."

Interesting to realize that I now have to equally self-censor whether I'm using WeChat (China) versus any US-based service (Western world) for communication..

Unless you're working on sensitive or compartmentalized tech, and talking about it on the platform, I don't even see why you'd need to self-censor on WeChat. The Chinese, for all their faults, don't seem to care what you do in your spare time.

That said, I don't know if I'd feel comfortable discussing my medical history over Gmail or Facebook, even if ostensibly "private."

> The Chinese, for all their faults, don't seem to care what you do in your spare time.

I thought pyrography (for example) was illegal in China

Today I learned about pyrography and a particularly dangerous technique called "fractal burning", where people use high-voltage electricity to burn patterns into wood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_burning

The result is quite beautiful, but I can see why some countries might want to regulate or prohibit it. Personally, I think people should be allowed to take such risks if they choose to do so.

That would be strange for a traditional Chinese art that's probably sold at airports and gift shops.

An autocorrupt of pornography

> The Chinese, for all their faults, don't seem to care what you do in your spare time.

No, they'll just dutifully record all activities in a dossier, until something interesting presents itself to be leveraged against you, or until they decide at a later date that what you do is distasteful.

It shouldn't be up to Facebook/Google to decide what is a crime, nor in which cases wiretapping should be allowed.

And as far as I know it isn't. At least these companies certainly comply with lawful warrants. They may be more helpful in cases of their choosing (e.g. CSAM) but are they really expected to refuse when a court orders them to assist with an investigation on the basis that they (to the extent possible for a company) disagree with the law in question?

I wanted to reply to GP with something along these lines, but I could not tell what the GPs comment actually meant, it was too ambiguous.

> It shouldn't be up to Facebook/Google to decide what is a crime, nor in which cases wiretapping should be allowed.

Could mean either:

1. FB/Google should be prevented from deciding what is and is not a crime. They don't set the laws.

2. FB/Google aren't setting the laws, so can't be blamed when complying with those laws.

Maybe it's my sleepiness, but I just cannot decide which of the two statements were intended by GP.

Abortions are now a crime in several American states, close if not equal to murder. These companies just do what they've always done when it comes to murder cases: hand over the data when the authorities demand it through warrants. As they should, in theory.

Facebook and Google are not to blame here; they're simply doing what the law demands of them. These companies are not above the law, they cannot refuse warrants. Blame Nebraskan and American federal law for this situation.

With a bit of luck, this situation will make these companies put more priority into E2EE. Had these conversations been done through Signal, there was likely nothing to be found or handed over.

> Facebook and Google are not to blame here; they're simply doing what the law demands of them

The article disagrees:

> One legal expert said social platforms may cooperate with police even if not legally required to.

Regardless, you are right these companies are morally culpable for not implementing E2EE.

>One legal expert said social platforms may cooperate with police even if not legally required to.

From my reading of the article this is purely speculative, however. There's no actual assertion that FB/Google are doing more than complying with valid warrants, other than observing that this appears to be the case with other types of warrants. So I guess one could fault these companies for not fighting tooth and nail over these warrants in a way they wouldn't for other warrants, but that seems like a weak condemnation.

> From my reading of the article this is purely speculative, however.

Apple publishes statistics about their shared data, and whether data shared was shared because of a warrant or request. The company very often just hands over data without a warrant, a simple request is all that's needed. I doubt they are unique in that regard.

Precisely. And, you know, maybe they could challenge some of these warrants, even if retroactively?

Yes, but to the one case specifically mentioned in the article Facebook said the warrant was valid. Hence further commentary about how companies are not simply doing as required in these specific cases is speculative. Seeing further discussion on this it seems unlikely that the warrants in question made any specific reference to abortion to begin with. So there isn't even a notion in many instances that these social media companies could provide extra scrutiny unless they made this determination on their own.

Maybe social media companies should fight tooth and nail over every data request, but somehow I think most people don't want this. The same people who would be outraged at Facebook turning over data in an abortion case are probably the ones who are fine with say Facebook turning over data related to the January 6th protestors. Is there actually a non viewpoint-based principled stance behind the outrage, or is this just an instance of working the ref to your team's advantage?

> Abortions are now a crime in several American states, close if not equal to murder. These companies just do what they've always done when it comes to murder cases: hand over the data when the authorities demand it through warrants. As they should, in theory.

Companies just hand over data when simply asked, they don't even need a warrant.

E2EE doesn't mean your IP is hidden. Briar uses Tor to hide IPs as well.

So if the Iranian government wants data, they should comply?

> So if the Iranian government wants data, they should comply?

If they want to do business in a certain nation, they'll have to comply with the laws of that nation.

Are you proposing that companies be above the law? That they should be able to pick and choose which laws apply to them?

Hmm...

What if they don't do business in that country but simply don't block that country?

A better question might be, "Should they have data in this readily accessible format given the potential moral hazards?"

They could opt-out of being forced to comply with or defy authorities.

I miss the good old days when you could just open a telephone book and no one would know what you were looking up. Now everything you do is recorded by a third party.

Don't use Facebook or Google.

Since communication was unencrypted, listening in was easy though. Even the instant messengers, up to 2005-2007, sent their messages in cleartext. So listening in was easy, but since storage was much more expensive, I don't think they bothered with recording them too much.

Regarding your conclusion, leaving FB and G is not even the hardest part. The hardest part is that your network probably won't follow.

Note that you can turn on E2E encryption in FB Messenger (as well as WhatsApp). It does lose a few features, but people should probably be aware it is possible.

Meta still knows who is messaging whom. Sending a message to a pharmacy or certain doctors would raise flags. E2EE isn't completely safe. Briar is decentralized (no central company or servers to watch) and uses Tor to hide IPs.

Baffling to me that people still use Messenger. Not even switching the company is necessary, with WhatsApp at least they'd have message encryption.

I’d say most WhatsApp users don’t realize they are backing up to Google Drive in clear text.

This is key. Both parties need to trust that their messages are staying within the realms of WhatsApp itself, and with the usage of disappearing mode, not leaving any traces of a conversation.

They should probably be using encryption within the chat itself (and not, you know, speaking in plain English) to add another layer. Perhaps changing the keys frequently via an agreed method (thinking about how to do that safely without leaving another trace) to render older messages 100% undecryptable.

But yeah, chances are all of that data is going to be accessed and they agreed to it! It's right there in the privacy policy people don't bother reading

For those using WhatsApp: you can actually encrypt the GDrive backups, and has been for a while now: https://www.androidpolice.com/whatsapp-end-to-end-encryption...

The default setting is still unencrypted backups, though.

Is the next step extending citizen rights to unborn babies?

And they wonder why we don't trust Big Tech.

What employees will think about their companies?

This is not the story.

The story is Roe v. Wade overturned due to heinous corruption of the US political process in favour of the religious right and free market libertarians.

Roe v. Wade was a corruption of the political progress (and I say this as a non-american pro-abortionist). If you want to have a law on abortion make an actual law.

I mean, SCOTUS said otherwise for fifty years. They decide what is and isn't legitimate and it was fair play until last year.

I agree with you in principle but AFAIK "actual laws" have never been necessary when the SCOTUS has declared a Constitutional right. Individual states don't need to codify a right to keep and bear arms, or freedom of speech or religion, nor can they choose to re-enable slavery or segregation, because those have all been decided at a higher level.

Yes, but a caveat by SCOTUS has the lifetime of a given group of justices. If you want that law to be effectively immortal, it needs to be implemented through the legislature, not backdoored through judicial fiat.

"Legislating from the bench" is considered poor form in legal circles for a reason.

SCOTUS has said plenty of stupid things (e.g. Dred Scott). Laws are the right way to do things.

And it's somewhat unclear to me why this should be a federal issue at all... isn't murder a state issue?

>And it's somewhat unclear to me why this should be a federal issue at all... isn't murder a state issue?

That's an odd framing for a self-described "pro-abortionist" to use, but no, obviously federal law against murder exists[0].

But of course the question of whether or not abortion is a matter of murder, fundamental bodily autonomy or both is a quagmire not worth getting into. Not that it's relevant to Roe v. Wade, or its appeal, because that rested on the question of the existence of a fundamental right to privacy and stare decisis.

I mean, read the dissenting opinions on Dobbs[1]. I think a good case is made there as to why this shouldn't be an issue left to the states, and why Roe wasn't repealed because it was bad law, but because the court was stacked with ideologues who were opposed to Roe for religious reasons.

You should be at least as angry about that as Roe itself, if not more so because that represents a far more egregious corruption of the system, but I suspect you aren't.

[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1111

[1]https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/24/read-supreme-court-...

The Constitution grants rights by default. Laws are only needed to remove rights.

> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Safeguarding the privacy of a user's personal information is a technological problem that should be solved through the development and correct usage of cryptographic primitives that secure that data.

I completely disagree. If you're trying to subvert the political/legal process through innovation then you're only accelerating the path to dystopia.

Wrong. It's a people problem. Any technological measure capable of reliably recovering information will be utilized or forced to be tapped by law enforcement. The problem is the law. The solution is not tech. The solution is changing the law. The cryptographic primitive approach is an elitist wet dream. The moment you employ it in enough sketchy contexts, then it itself will be seen as evidence of criminal doing. The UK/Europe has already been sniffing in that direction w.r.t possession of heavily encrypted phone handsets/telephony systems.

That's not even the story.

The story is Roe v. Wade was overturned due to the US political process working exactly as it as designed to, with the religious right telegraphing their play for decades, and progressives doing nothing about it except trying to fundraise on the aftermath.

That's not entirely true. They also bought candles and tote bags.

More seriously, there has been substantial opposition to the anti-abortion long game but it's not easy to secure abortion rights in Nebraska from NY without federal law. But Roe made securing abortion federally a little moot and maybe not the hill a slim majority wants to die on when they have other priorities. Then they didn't get justices to retire when they could be replaced, although it's questionable that would have been allowed to happen anyway. Bad strategy but not complete inaction. They have been trying to oppose laws in states but gerrymandering means that the Right gets unfairly more representation in those states like Georgia.

Aren't they handling user data for any other case of law breaking?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/pakistan-asks-...

>Pakistan asks Facebook and Twitter to help identify blasphemers

>Companies approached in effort to locate Pakistanis at home or abroad so they can be prosecuted or potentially extradited

The framing is inflammatory. What most people can agree upon is that the surveillance state is out of control.

I'm sure I'll be flamed into oblivion here, but it is worth considering the headline from the perspective of the anti-abortionists. If we cannot empathize or attempt to understand those who disagree, what is the point of having a discussion?

"FB and Google hand over user data, help to prosecute baby killers"

Reasonable people can disagree on the topic of abortion or at what stage of pregnancy it is acceptable. HN is not the place where I want to have that discussion. It has already been explored at depth elsewhere.

I've often been puzzled by why the abortion argument is seen as a binary. The majority of people in the developed world feel that the abortion legality line should be somewhere between conception and birth. Honestly, based on my somewhat biased sampling, there's probably a similar number of people who think infanticide should sometimes be legal as people who think a single fertilized egg has a right to life.

This is definitely a big part of the problem. Media outlets are looking for outrage. They need only conflate a ban on late term abortion with a blanket ban. For the other side, vice versa.

If you would have read the article to the end you would have noticed that is puts the blame on law enforcement and legislation.

Think of it this way though: 50 years of legal precedent was overturned last year. Women who are young enough to get abortions have lived their entire lives not being considered murderers, legally. Abortion was an explicitly protected legal right. Now suddenly, a woman is transformed overnight from a citizen freely exercising their legal right into an illegal murderer — but of course only in certain localities. How are they supposed to deal with this massive U-turn? Can we not empathize with them?

It's one thing to make providing abortions illegal. It's quite another thing to prosecute the women.

Sounds opposite to what’s going on with pot in many states. Illegal for decades. Now legal. Massive U-turn.

Laws of the land change, like everything else in this world.

The crucial difference is that pot users don't suffer from the massive U-turn. Rather, they celebrate it. They're the ones who lobbied for the change.

Suddenly making people happy and freer is fine. Suddenly making them miserable and taking away their longstanding rights is another matter.

It's the same thing with women getting the right to vote in 1920. Women themselves wanted it and lobbied for it!

Abortions were a convenient way to keep women locked into the workforce. There could be no escape from wageslaving. Now that the population is in the shitter, they criminalize abortion.

Disingenuous. Contraception and abortions freed women from being locked into patriarchal family structures (see the thousands of years of history where women were passed from father, to brother, to husband with no choice in the matter).

Not entirely, but it is a contributing factor: Women aren't suck having children and stuck staying with some guy because she can't support herself. It isn't the only benefit nor the only outcome of having these - we've had different sorts of abortion and imperfect contraception for thousands of years. Women are still stuck in such societies. Safe contraception and safe abortions keep women from dying. Women are able to have fewer children, spaced further apart, making for healthier women and healthier children - even in such traditional societies, assuming folks have access to these things.

Exactly

For men, it was always "pro-choice", child support and paternity tests are a recent invention (and don't compare with how hard it is to raise a kid)

If men got pregnant you could have your abortion together with your haircut

Are you advocating for the return of the barber surgeon?

> For men, it was always "pro-choice"

You dramatically underestimate the number of both men and women who’re against abortion.

Are you counting those with unrecognized paternities?

Because it's very easy to be against abortion and having somebody else raise the child you should have been responsible for.

That's at least a tertiary factor in "freeing" women.

1. The creation of domestic appliances that dramatically shorten house hold chores (washing clothing is a main one).

2. The move from the bulk of work labour being less physical.

Both meant there was less time needed to maintain a household, previously that was a full time job that seemed unpaid. And that women had suitable roles available in the work force where as manual labour would mean they likely couldn't compete with men for employment.

While society gained extra productivity from these changes, it's debatable if households gained financially as it was likely a powerful force in the mid century inflation.

I'd place centralised schooling in that list of things which freed up more labour. Contraceptives are recognised for this too, and I'm sure it lead to a sexual liberation at least.

Indeed. A household with a single wage earner will have a lot more free time. Its not just cleaning and cooking, it's paying bills, organising holidays, going shopping, arranging events/parties, socialising with neighbours, taking kids places, birthday cards/presents, keeping up with local council issues to be able to vote sensibly... the list goes on.

Honestly, given where the productivity gains of women in the workforce went (not to the actual workers), we'd probably have a better quality of life if only half the household adults worked.

Wages stagnate when there are an abundance of workers and a shortage of jobs. Corporations don't care about empowerment of women they care about keeping wages down across the board.

It's why they were offering women several thousand dollars in reimbursements to travel for an abortion. Those employers were unwilling to provide the same amount to women who wanted to keep their baby.

> they were offering women several thousand dollars in reimbursements to travel for an abortion.

Isn't that contract killing now?

Edit: Thanks for downvoting a honest question!

Good question really, I suppose it depends if having had an abortion is a crime. I've only peripherally followed the news but i think some places do want to make it a crime.

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