Facebook turns over chats to police resulting in abortion charges (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Facebook turns over chats to police resulting in abortion charges (2022)

theverge.com

54 pointsmdhb41 comments

The way to look at this is that this is what happens when you don’t have safe and legal medical abortions.

Also this is one of the reasons why e2e encryption is so important. Meta had to comply with a warrant and wouldn’t have had to comply if it was impossible for them to.

End-to-end encryption only prevents in-flight access of the data by your ISP. At either "end" that data can be trivially decrypted, and probably isn't even stored on an encrypted server to boot. It would require a lot more than E2EE to meaningfully resist government surveillance.

Just to clarify one possible misconception, the two ends would be the mother and daughter’s phones in this case. Meta shouldn’t have the key to decrypt accessible to them.

You’re absolutely correct that it can be decrypted on either end but Meta should resist putting a backdoor in their app that allows this. If no other reason than it compels them to be in the middle of this criminal case.

Also Facebook Messenger already enables this (https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1084673321594605) but it’s not the default. It should be.

This is just basic privacy and for sure won’t protect you from a focused government attack but it’s a start.

This is the part where things get ambiguous and it's hard to say how things go. On paper, you are correct and I 100% agree with everything in this comment. In practice, I have no reason to believe anything Facebook says correlates with the implementation of their encryption.

I want to believe it's a safe system, but as-always it comes down to trusting trust. Without accountability, it's hard to take WhatsApp or iMessage or any E2EE service at face value. E2EE leaves so many exploits on the table that I basically treat it as marketing fluff.

> The way to look at this is that this is what happens when you don’t have safe and legal medical abortions.

Most places with legal abortions don't seem to allow them at 28 weeks so that would not have helped in this case.

One assumes they would have taken care of it during the legal timeframe. Not relevant if they didn’t in this case.

There’s also other options still by going to other states, but the point is that by making it illegal you’re increasing the chances of it being unsafe.

But anyway, that’s as far as I’m wading into that subject here. Don’t feel like getting into politics so much as practicalities.

> One assumes they would have taken care of it during the legal timeframe. Not relevant if they didn’t in this case.

Abortion at up to 20 weeks was legal in her state at the time.

You are correct but I don’t think that invalidates the point that if you want safe abortions you need to make them legal and regulated.

I have no idea why they chose pills on the Internet but I know that more people will do it themselves if they can’t legally go to a healthcare provider.

wow, "Celeste Burgess, who was 28 weeks pregnant at the time, and her mother Jessica Burgess, who allegedly performed an abortion without a licensed doctor present. The investigation began after police received a tip that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child." This is in Nebraska FYI. And Meta emphasized that the search warrant it received was legal and valid and did not specifically mention abortion. All it said was "a stillborn baby being burned and buried" so...

I was expecting to be outraged at Facebook, but reading how the warrant was cleverly phrased, I dont belive they did anything questionable.

and 28 weeks vs 40 weeks makes no difference? Some would debate "a still born baby" implies full term?

24 weeks is viable nowadays. 37 is full term

So yeah, baby.

Handing over someone’s chats isn’t questionable? Let’s at least try not to normalize surveillance.

wow, such good arguments on both sides. I need to re-watch 1984.

It shouldn't be possible for them to turn over the chats. E2E encryption is tables stakes for messaging, but they won't do it because there's profit to be had in understanding users through their private messages.

So yes, Facebook is still in the wrong here.

They do offer an E2E platform Whatsapp which is wildly popular in the rest of the world AND the ability to have e2e encrypted chats on messenger too.

So really what more to expect?

How would E2E encryption stop law enforcement from subpoenaing data at-rest?

I think E2E is encrypted at rest. Technically, all data over TLS is encrypted while in transit.

E2EE strictly means that it is encrypted between endpoints. It makes no promises about how the keys are handled, how the data is protected at rest, or how secure either endpoint is. TLS is a version of this, but also demonstrates how useless such a version of encryption is if either endpoint is malicious.

This is one of the reasons homomorphic encryption is interesting. It should enable this kinda of "total user control" over your data, but it's highly unlikely consumer systems will implement it.

They have been rolling out E2E chats in messenger for a while now. So yes, they will and are doing it.

If it were table stakes people would opt for messeaging applications that have it, seeing that there's a plethora of them out there.

I don't like Facebook, and I don't use it or any of Meta's products, but if people want encryption they have options.

So, 1) this was after 20 weeks, which in their state was already illegal even before Roe v Wade was overturned, and 2) a warrant was issued by a judge for the information, which Facebook has an obligation to comply with.

This is neither a case of abortion restrictions "in a post Roe America" nor is it a case of Facebook willy nilly turning information over to law enforcement on request. This article is an attempt to drum up controversy where there is none, or at Tue very least associate it with a controversial issue it has nothing to do with.

Even worse than Facebook chats... the most popular period tracking apps can be mass surveilled, and at least one has been fined by the FTC for selling menstrual data.

My partner, a menstrual health advocate, decided to do something about it. She's launching a local-first, encrypted period tracking app later this summer [0].

We'd love feedback as the beta goes live!

[0] - https://embody.space

The Apple Health app does this already. Everything in HealthKit is e2e encrypted.

A few of my tech guy friends have given this knee-jerk response. However...

Flo isn't. Clue isn't. Most apps women actually use aren't. HealthKit is cool, but we need apps that aren't sending data home *and* that solve common menstrual needs, and Apple's stuff barely scratches the surface.

Why does menstual data have to be encrypted in the first place? Why can it not just live on the device? There are FOSS trackers (I've tried them; not a woman but I used them to help teach my wife to track her cycle) and they work wonders. There's one called Log28 on f-droid for anyone interested, that's the best one I found.

In states like Texas...? Like the article mentions, this data is sensitive and prosecutors are going after it. If your phone is in custody and doesn't have a strong passphrase, or uses touch ID... not great.

I agree open source and local-only are great! Defense in depth is ideal

Sure, but when someone says "your data is encrypted" usually that means it's going to a cloud server somewhere, and that makes me feel the need to ask what the business case is, how is that case opposed to my interest and what would the host do if compelled with a warrant for the data.

Oh, in our case we're talking about local encryption at rest... resilient in case a phone is lost or physically compromised.

> Sure, but when someone says "your data is encrypted" usually that means it's going to a cloud server somewhere

This says a lot about the health of surveillance capitalism today, not gonna lie.

Facebook complies with legal warrant

When a company like FB disputes a warrant, what happens? What sort of precedents are there around that?

Does fb messenger claim e2e encryption? Does WhatsApp have e2e encryption? Are any of the chat apps truly e2e encrypted if the provider created your private key for you?

I support a woman's right to choose but this is a nothing burger because they literally broke the law, and I mean they had plenty of time before 20 weeks to terminate. This had nothing to do with roe v Wade in any way and is just a click bait title.

Needs a (2022)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com