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Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by JRepin@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] wide_eyed_stupid@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You can think the mother and daughter should face consequences AND at the same time think it's beyond disgusting that facebook even has this info to begin with AND that they handed it over so easily.

The problem isn't that "facebook followed the law" -- it's that they knowingly created a situation where they could follow the law to begin with. If they would stop collecting so much data and just encrypt their chats, there would already be less of an issue.

I think people have the tendency to think like "well I have nothing to hide, so who cares?" or "well in this case I agree with what happened, so it's fine." But laws get changed all the time, government changes all the time. And when a dictator at some point changes some laws, suddenly facebook is 'following the law' by giving law enforcement information on who is atheist, or gay, or what books you like, what your political opinions are, etc. They'd still be "following the law" -- but just because something is law doesn't make it right and imo it's terrifying that companies who have so much money and power (and with it you would hope: responsibility) don't seem to have any scrupules regarding working with government/LE.