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.
Well, don’t use Facebook to talk about doing things that are illegal. Why do people not use common sense?
Because when you talk person to person, most average people do not think there’s a middle man ease dropping.
Are they listening from the eaves or listening with ease? Or perhaps both.
To the people shitting on the idea of a default defederation with Meta, how about we deferedate not because it will affect us as posters but because they are evil pieces of shit?
yeah, the difference is pretty stark:
- lemmy: we’ll give you a way to dm anyone on site, but please don’t use that, if you set up an app on this other open source service we’re not affiliated with (which is basically an encrypted discord) we’ll do our best to make it as seamless for you as possible. we’ll keep warning you for your own privacy.
- meta/facebook: aggressively keeps you on-platform for spying purposes; literally killed xmpp a decade ago and they’ll fuckin do it again (if we let them)
They trust me. Dumb fucks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
(yes it sounds like satire but that’s a real quote)
The Lemmy DM is imo actually quite important. If I want to get in touch with someone about a post, nothing more. It is an easy option, and serves a purpose. It isn’t imo meant to be used for anything else.
yep, it’s important that we have this capability, but it’s also nice that unlike other platforms that do their best to lock you in, lemmy actively pushes you toward a safer alternative
What’s the name of that safer alternative?
Matrix, which is pretty much an encrypted and open-source Discord clone (at least in the same fashion as Lemmy would be a Reddit clone). I personally use Element to interact with it and have a matrix.org account, but Matrix is just like the fediverse, you can choose any instance or client you want, or even host an instance yourself. In your Lemmy settings you can set up your Matrix user, right below your email address as of 0.18.1, and if you do, a new buttons saying “send secure message” will show up on your profile, next to “send message”, which will redirect people trying to message you to Matrix.
Was it Facebook that killed xmpp or Google? Legitimately asking because I’ve always seen that blamed on Google.
It was Google, they Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished it with Google Chat. Then they killed that themselves.
correction: it was both! fedbook chat also supported xmpp at first, they never federated but you could at least use it with a jabber client. then when they had enough market share they killed it.
fun semi related fact is that whatsapp, at least a couple of years ago, was using modified ejabberd (ie an xmpp server) as the backend - so arguably they helped with EEE too.
How on earth did Meta kill XMPP, where is that even from lol. They didn’t even have a standalone messaging app until 2011, which is after Google Talk dropped support for XMPP.
Some game-of-telephone misinformation originating from this article - though it has gone from Google killed it (which this article states), to it was a protocol that allowed Facebook and Google to communicate and then got killed, to Facebook killed it.
my understanding was that while google is the main culprit, facebook and google both played a big part in killing it. but since we’re discussing meta/facebook here, and they’re not blameless, i focused on that.
but yeah, fuck google too.
they’re not blameless
I think we should try to do better here and provide actual reasoning to our statements instead of unbridled rage, regardless of the topic, because this isn’t valuable content. I work in an adjacent industry and I believe that a lot of what people have said lately about this topic is overly sensationalized and I don’t mind discussing it, but “fuck Meta/Google because they’re evil” is subjective as hell and gets us nowhere except back to Reddit culture.
This discussion pyramid was a good post from the other day:
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b48a0a91-c7a3-4cc5-a117-6deceedde205.png
Your comments are “ad hominem” at best.
in a thread where we’re discussing how meta helped religiofascists violate someone’s human rights “meta is evil” is a summary, not an ad hominem
That’s literally nowhere in this chain of comments.
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Fine, their comments are nonsense that aren’t based in reality and the Fediverse and it’s communities will suffer the fate of every other echo chamber shithole social media if it’s moderators don’t take action and make a conscious decision to tackle misinformation, regardless of whether or not it fits their personal bias. Better?
Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol. And that’s what all of this boils down to, trust. Do we trust Meta with not exploiting all of our data, and turning it against us at the earliest opportunity? Do we trust Meta that they want to contribute to the fediverse, and not just hurt it because it’s a competitor?
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem. But at the end of the day, it’s just practical. Meta has a long and not so proud history of being extremely anti-consumer, and shoving that track record under the rug, trying to absolve them of responsibility and consequences for their actions, under the thought-terminating cliche of an ad hominem is neither productive nor practical.
Yes, people are mad at Meta, and yes, the distrust means their actions are scrutinized more than they otherwise would be, but that doesn’t mean that their actions aren’t actually massively anti-consumer, and that they aren’t a massive liability. In this particular case, you can make the argument that they had a legal obligation to hand over the data, had they not tried to build a walled garden with no privacy they wouldn’t have had the data to hand over to begin with.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the
syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol.
It is literally ad hominem, that is the definition. We aren’t discussing whether we can trust Meta or not, we’re discussing a specific topic.
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem.
It definitely is, but again, we aren’t discussing a person or an entity, we’re discussing a topic related to that person or entity. This isn’t a discussion on whether Meta should be defederated or not, frankly that’s simple, just join an instance that defederates with Meta or don’t, or build your own! There’s a ton of freedom here.
And I’m not saying ad hominem arguments can’t be used, but when an argument is entirely made up of ad hominem points while discussing a specific topic it isn’t a good argument.
Also, side note, as for trust I definitely don’t think we can trust corporate entities, but I also don’t think we can entirely trust the Fediverse as it exists already. We know there’s been an influx of bot accounts, moderation tools aren’t great yet, and every platform attracts bad actors.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the
syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)Thanks for the tip! Haven’t been able to get that working well here, I think I was missing the exclamation mark.
That was a quote from 13 years ago when he didn’t know how massive his enterprise would become. People change.
As for him, he became more evil.
But also fuck these laws and the people passing them and the people voting for the people passing them. They’re the real evil.
We have to always assume rich corporations are going to do whatever serves their best interest. It’s nature. Like a mantis is gonna bite off her mate’s head when they’re done mating. It’s up to governing factors to keep them in check. On that note, +1 to defederate. They will cannibalize or however abuse Lemmy if it will make them a penny.
This. I don’t need to win, I just want Meta to lose.
Any Lemmy instance would have given over the same information in this case. Meta was complying with a valid, legal search warrant.
If some fuckstick from Nebraska asked me to snitch on my users for something which isn’t a crime in my state, I would simply tell them to fuck themselves, go ahead, and try to have me extradited. If my instance were bordering on a trillion dollars market cap, I’d hire a fucking lawyer.
You sound tough.
No you wouldn’t.
Are you saying that the individuals who run these servers and instances aren’t subject to the same laws? I read the article, and Facebook complied with a court order.
You don’t think anyone running Lemmy would do the same without access to lawyers and capital like Facebook has?
Lemmy promotes using Matrix, which is a separate service, so instance admins don’t need to be in the business of hosting private conversations.
Matrix is end-to-end encrypted so even the admins of your Matrix server could not provide your chats to law enforcement.
I wish Lemmy was as well. Ah well.
It’s not really possible as long as Lemmy is a website. E2EE works on Matrix because it’s an app, and therefore it can manage your encryption keys in ways a browser cannot do for you. (You can save things in the client, but not in a reliable enough way for something like the master key for every communication you ever had that if you lose you get locked out of all your chat history.) In the case of Lemmy, the signing keys for your federated actions are handled by the server, which is perfectly fine for 99% of what you use Lemmy for (public posts and comments), but it also means that even if they implemented E2EE for chats, the keys to decrypt the convo would be right on the same server.
That’s why Lemmy actively pushes you to set up a Matrix account, because Matrix makes better tradeoffs for the purposes of messaging, while Lemmy’s tradeoffs are more relevant to a link aggregator style social media.
Matrix is also a website and you don’t need an app to use it. The first time I used Matrix, I didn’t use an app, I merely signed in on a browser window (in my case, Mozilla’s instance). I first signed up on my work laptop, then later signed in on my desktop and had to confirm the new account on my laptop before my desktop would work with the same account.
The more devices it’s on the better, but it’s totally usable with just one web client. I now also have the phone app, but I didn’t at first.
If Matrix can do that, lemmy can as well. It would probably degrade the user experience because you’d need a decryption step for every post and comment you load (just like loading a new Matrix room), but it is technically possible.
I’m not necessarily asking for every comment to be encrypted, I just think it would be a good idea for DMs to be encrypted using keys the admin doesn’t have access to. It would be cool for communities to allow encryption as an option as well (i.e. all posts and comments would be E2E encrypted to all members, and not viewable unless you join), but it shouldn’t be the default everywhere.
Do you have to run your lemmy instance in the US?
Maybe do it in a less backward place
And how can we be sure that all the instances federated with any instance we participate on aren’t run by law enforcement themselves? I’d be surprised if there aren’t running instances by every major investigative agency themselves.
This is why everyone should take steps to protect their privacy. You don’t have to go 0-100 overnight. Just audit yourself and do a few things now. Keep those habits up. Then audit and add a few more things, repeat.
I need to do this myself, I’ve been slipping
Almost all countries have similar systems for obtaining evidence. These people were criminals, they broke the law and the legal system worked as designed to bring them to “justice”. Meta was just a pawn here with very little influence.
If this story was about a murder rather than an abortion people would think that Meta did the right thing to bring the murderer to justice. As I see it the problem is that people disagree with the law and are using Meta as a scapegoat. But you don’t fix stupid laws by having corporations go vigilante. I’d rather not have billionaires coming up with their own set of laws, that is a recipe for disaster. I think we need to fix the laws, which will fix the root cause of this issue.
Also use E2EE for all private information, cryptography can’t be compelled to reveal your private data by a court order.
Do you think people who collaborated with dictatorial regimes should be excused? Because they followed the law?
Why didnt Meta implant E2EE on their private chat service then?
This is what I can agree with. We could blame Meta for encouraging people to give them data. Messenger does actually have E2EE encryption (apparently) but it is quite hidden and limited in functionality. If they made it the default this wouldn’t have been a position they ended up in, and they could have responded to the warrant with “We have no information matching this request.”
Because it will bring more people to the fedi while bringing a ton more content, support and development. How are people this blind still?
Give the choice to the users and don’t decide what you think is best for them.
What good is that bloated userbase if it’s just dead or abandoned accounts? If anything, they are more likely to just ctrl + C > ctrl + V their users as well as their privacy policy on their client, which doesn’t really help anyone. Besides, can facebook really be trusted to play by the rules?
That’s just straight up not true. Also I hope you are aware how Hot/Active/Top sort works. Let that decision be left up to the users instead of forcing your misinformation on to them.
yo by any chance do you got some stuff I could look into when it comes to how the fediverse works and how threads works as well? If I am wrong, I want to at least see why and also because Yeah to an extent I am kinda assuming stuff based on the comments I’m reading as well as what I personally think.
Well active and hot stuff shows new content and stuff that is being upvoted and commented on. They also tend to drop in time to be replaced by new content and so old content isn’t perpetually on the front page. So if it’s only active stuff showing up, dead accounts on threads would never show up or really affect anything, right? They’d just be buried in Meta’s huge database.
Ya. That’s fucked. Just ruin someone’s life like that. Holy fuck.
I totally agree with your sentiment… However they don’t have a choice. They are legally obligated to turn that information over if they are served a warrant. Doing anything less is obstruction at the very least and they could be shut down and put into receivership.
The fault here is with the two individuals trusting a corporation to keep data private and to put the individuals interests ahead of the corporation. Neither is a realistic expectation.
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?
At this point, they’ll just say “yeah, but these people did a crime. I don’t do crimes so I have nothing to worry about”. The problem with that mentality, I would hope, doesn’t need to be stated.
I stopped trying to change the world.
This is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time and you ain’t getting that data back.
How is this an example of the government turning into a “fascist dictatorship”?
Reading comprehension is hard, so I’ll help you out.
This [event mentioned on the news] is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can [i.e. has the potential to] turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time [which is unrelated to this specific piece of news, being a hypothetical scenario] and you ain’t getting that data back.
I can read just fine, I’m just wondering how you correlate this with the possibility of the government turning into a fascist dictatorship. They’re 2 completely unrelated things, that’s why I’m confused to why you put them together. You even literally say it’s unrelated to this piece of news…
Are you serious, or being a pitiful basement troll?
Action is not illegal → Service provider has unprivateable data on action → Action becomes illegal → You now have confessed to your crime
Can’t make it much more obvious
I thought ex post facto laws were forbidden.
Are you being serious, or just being a pitiful basement troll yourself?
You’re saying because they did thing A it means you should be wary because thing Z might happen, even though things A and Z have literally nothing to do with each other nor does A happening give any likelihood of Z happening.
I agree that these people did a crime.
I just don’t think their crime should be illegal.
If this was about murdering a full-grown adult and not aborting a fetus, nobody would be talking about privacy concerns. Guaranteed.
How do you know they committed a crime. After reading the article I don’t know. It looks totally as if it’s possible that she just had a miscarriage.
Maybe there’s just a prosecutor eager for convictions.
Maybe she was trying do avoid exactly this kind of trouble.
She took abortion drugs…
Also, there’s no general agreement or scientific pointing of where life and consciousness is started on a fetus so, if the government job is to conserve the life of a individual, a fetus life still matters and shouldn’t be taken by neither the parents or anyone else.
Brazil (ironically enough) has a good constitution about about abortion where’s it is strictly prohibited unless some cases apply like: the baby has developed no brain, the baby has originated from a sexual assault case or the process of giving birth or the pregnancy itself represents a risk of death for the mother. It is simple, states that life’s have the same values as well as showing the individual rights matter.
Why do you think a life created by sexual assault is less valuable than a life created otherwise? Isn’t the resulting life the same?
Thinking this through might help you understand the tradeoffs behind most abortions. Pregnancy is dangerous, childbirth is dangerous, parenting is incredibly difficult.
A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures. How do you evaluate the harm caused by that against the harm caused by being forced to carry a child produced by sexual assault?
It is not less valuable but the way it was created was against the individual rights of the mother.
I agree abortion laws are about trade-offs as I showed in my example and that’s why abortion shouldn’t be legal in the cases I stated. Abortion shouldn’t be legal for anyone cause, if it was in a consensual relationship, the mother assumed the risk of pregnancy.
The only lives that are less valuable are those which deliberately risk or take way the others’ lives.
Also, thanks for being respectful.
The only lives that are less valuable are those which deliberately risk or take way the others’ lives.
By choosing to be alive, you’re impacting all present and future generations, causing the deaths of potentially billions of humans and countless other animals. Do you see how your attempted distinction doesn’t actually exist?
I guess you don’t know much about numbers.
A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures.
A child can also be put up for adoption btw.
Which often means shoving them into massively underfunded institutions, that are full of corruption and abuse, making it a less than ideal alternative.
Less ideal than being dead?
If you care so much, go ahead and adopt a child.
Nah I’m ok. If she wanted an abortion she should have gotten one in the 20 weeks where she’s legally allowed to. Doesn’t seem like a hard thing to do.
You’re joking, right? First, abortions aren’t mentioned in the Brazilian constitution - you’d have to look at specific legal codices, such as the Civil Code or the Penal Code. Second, that’s the bare minimum, not “pretty good”.
The objective is supposed to be to find the situations where abortion would be fair a fair trade-off of lives and rights, not to try to speedrun the abortion rank; it makes no sense you’re saying it is bare minimum when the objective is to reduce it as it is inherently bad.
Would you be ok with someone aborting a 39 week old fetus? What about a 40 week old fetus? What about during labour?
Slippery slope fallacy detected
We’d still be talking about the privacy part because it’d be still more concerning than the death of one random dude.
For what it’s worth, the fetus was viable outside the womb 4 weeks before they did this. Viable at 24 weeks, aborted at 28. Pretty fucked up imo
I agree with you, but I don’t think I could explicitly state what’s wrong with that mentality. Can you humor me and state it?
Edit: can someone else take a shot at it? Tge parent comment is essentially saying “people will counter with X, but everyone knows that doesn’t make sense”. It’s clear that something is wrong with that mentality, but it obviously would have a very real benefit of stating it’s flaws since the whole premise of this is that some people don’t know what’s wrong with that mentality.
No one has anything to hide, until they do
I once heard that “Anyone can be charged with a crime if they can be watched closely enough for long enough.”
America is a terrifying church with guns. I pity the citizens.
Every country has the anti-abortion cancer movement and it wouldn’t surprise me if the shit gets more serious here in Europe too with the rise of far right parties. As a matter of fact you have only to look at Poland.
We’ll keep saying that can’t happen here right up until it happens
This isn’t purely anti-abortion pearl clutching in this instance. Where this occurred it is perfectly legal to have an abortion into the 20th week of pregnancy.
Fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks.
They killed the fetus with meds at 28 weeks, the pregnant 17 year old still went through labor (with no medical supervision due to how they chose to do this), they burned he remains, and then buried them on a farm.
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That’s a massive oversimplification of things. Intentionally removing nuance doesn’t help people.
More response in my other reply to your similar message
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.
Completely right. This is an education issue.
There are several other issues how these two handled this situation.
Court and police records show that police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess after receiving a tip-off that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child given birth to prematurely by Celeste.
Don’t discuss this or involve anyone else.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
Why are they even talking to police? Lawyer up, even if the lawyer is free.
(E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
Facebook messenger and text message is the absolute worse way to discuss things like this. They should’ve at least turned on E2EE but they already admitted fault and their devices would’ve been taken away anyway.
They seem like they together. They should’ve just discussed this in person.
Granted, I’m lucky enough never to have been arrested or questioned about a crime. I don’t know how difficult and manipulative interrogations are outside of what I’ve seen on TV. Even still, I’m amazed by and critical of people who talk to the police without a lawyer present.
Even if you think (or know) you’re guilty, that doesn’t mean you should let the system have its way with you.
On one hand - yes Meta followed the legal requirement, but the bigger picture is that people always say “so what it’s <insert deficiency> just don’t do anything illegal”. But that’s only fine when legality matches morality. And the disparity has been growing lately.
And y’all thought China having your data was something to be afraid of.
Curious why you are so comfortable with that?
China spying is a problem for your government, your government spying is your problem.
I never said I was comfortable with it, but you clearly missed the point I was making.
Worry about what data is being harvested in your own country where a law change can suddenly put you in danger of being arrested before worrying about China having some of your data.
Is it bad how much data the Chinese govt get from you using apps like Tik Tok or phones made by Huawei? Sure, but the threat is a lot closer to home than you think as this article shows.
Here’s a novel concept - we’re against our government doing it too, obviously. I don’t know why you think we wouldn’t be, this is the stupidest divorced from reality gotcha take
Lol get it all out bro.
Lawl
So either FB isn’t actually E2E, or their implementation is Twitter-grade broken.
Who said facebooks private chat would be e2e?
Facebook claims to have E2E chats, but not by default. Likely these people used the default, non E2E messages.
Not that I’d trust FACEBOOK with E2E anyway.
this is pretty disgusting even for Facebook
This is right up their alley.
this is pretty disgusting even for Facebook
Not really. I mean, what did you expect from a company that’s responsible for manipulation of two major, major elections (one in the US and UK each) as well as a genocide in SEA?
And that’s just what’s known publicly.
There is no way for these companies to say no to law enforcement. That is why you should stay away from corporate social media.
America fuck yeahhh 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅🦅
She aborted at 28 weeks. That’s nearly 6 and a half months pregnant. Most babies can survive outside the womb when they’re around 22 to 23 weeks. This was a baby, not some tiny fetus.
Perhaps this may be the case. But I’m sure she’d have got the abortion far earlier if not for these backwards laws against it
I was born decades ago and 2 months early; in the glass box for weeeeks to beat the 11% survival-at-all stats.
Having said that, IT’S STILL NOT FACEBOOK’S BUSINESS as a conveyor and not a filter.
You’re right, it’s not Facebook’s business, but this 17-year old and her mother chose to discuss a crime on Facebook’s platform. Facebook had a legal obligation to hand over those messages because they were served a valid warrant.
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Remember folks, when subverting a theocratic hellscape, use something encrypted.
This isn’t subversion, or any sort of theocratic hellscape.
Girl could have gotten an abortion 100% legally up through 20 weeks of preganancy. At 24 weeks the fetus becomes viable outside the womb. At 28 weeks she (with the assistance of her mother) took meds to kill the fetus and induce a stillbirth, commenting that she couldn’t wait to be able to wear jeans again.
She goes through natural labor to pass the stillbirth outside of any medical facility or supervision, burns the remains, and buries them on a farm. When questioned by police, she and her mother admit to using Facebook Messenger to discuss their plans.
The only thing in any way related to the romanticized fiction of some sort of downtrodden freedom seeker you’re talking about is that using encrypted communications would have prevented their discussions from being available to be subpeona’d. That said, admitting to police you even had those discussions in the first place kind of defeats the damn purpose.
We don’t even know if she had an abortion. May she had a miscarriage and was just trying to avoid what’s happening now, being accused of having had an abortion.
Now that sounds a lot like theocratic hellscape…
I’ve taken the liberty of re-reading the article and have some things to point out 1. the girl was 17, a literal child, something you seemed to forget in your comment 2. You mentioned that she wanted to wear jeans again and that that was the motive, but the word ‘jeans’ wasn’t even mentioned, which makes me wonder if you’re tampering with anything in your comment coming from the article. All that considered you have a good point with some things such as in this specific situation such as them confessing to conspiracy was not a good idea, but I will still say use something end to end encrypted when doing something like this.
When you oppose the left-wing, you’re defending this.
btw, I oppose both
It’s kind of stupid to think that one side would use it and the other wouldn’t. Just because they aren’t destroying your privacy for this purpose doesn’t mean left leaning politicians wouldn’t use your data for their own clandestine reasons.
Facebook doesn’t use e2e.
There is a private chat e2e feature, but then your chats don’t show up on PC.
