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.
This is 100% true, but also this is less of a Facebook bad issue and more of a state law issue.
Facebook was subpoenaed to provide this info, they didn’t willingly hand it over. I’d be interested to see how many lemmings here jumping down the meta bad rabbithole would have the stones to ignore a subpoena lmao.
Well it could have been end to end encrypted leaving no way to turn anything over. It’s like turning over someones mail after it has been delivered because you made a copy of everything that came through.
Or, and I know Meta would find this absurd, but maybe don’t collect that data to begin with?!
How… do you think messaging platforms work?
The respectable ones like Signal have nothing to hand over because either it is E2EE or they just don’t profile you at all. If the mom and her daughter had used Signal instead, Signal would’ve complied and only been able to serve the court the metadata.
Facebook neither encrypts the data nor does it only take what’s given to them by the user. There is so much non-consensual data harvesting happening on that platform, that they claim their users agreed to, when no one actually did, since their TOS are such a mess and are constantly being updated.
Just like IRC, for example.
Why would I compare myself to a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Someone somewhere along the chain of command would have to give the order to ignore the subpoena. That person would presumably be held responsible as an individual, just like you or me.
They could get contempt of court charges and spend time in jail, pretty much arbitrarily long - as long as judge feels
What? You think individuals in corporations are held accountable in the US?
It happens occasionally although you are more or less correct. My state’s old governor was the CEO of a company that committed at the time the largest healthcare fraud in US history.
Instead of going to jail he became the governor.
So ya I see your point. I would still of course be hesitant to push my luck and ignore a subpoena. Pushed hard enough, they will get ya. Look at how Epstein was eventually out in jail.
I suppose mainly it’s about money and power. It’s rare for someone really wealthy to suffer serious consequences. Before Epstein went to prison, he got a ridiculous deal from the guy who was later Trump’s Sec of Labor, Acosta, where he had to report to prison each night but was out for 12 hours a day or something… since, you know, his work is so important because he was wealthy.
I’m not sure about individuals, but a company can be sanctioned in various ways for ignoring a subpoena… usually something like being prohibited to operate in a state, or being dissolved. Fairly unlikely that would happen to a company the size of facebook. I guess I’m not sure whether a subpoena like the one in the article is addressed to a corporation in general, a department of the company, or an individual?