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.
They are just complying with the law here. As much as I don’t think Meta are great people I’d rather that they follow the law than make their own decisions. Of course we should also consider fixing these laws, but that isn’t really Meta’s responsibility.
Law enforcement will knock on the doors of Fediverse servers and there will need to be some monetary fund for legal fees.
If law enforcement knocks on my door with a valid warrant I’m going to comply. It would be nice to have some legal assistance to help validate the warrant but at the end of the day in this case it was almost certainly valid.
If this was about a murder rather than abortion people would be applauding Meta for helping catch the murderer. I think what people are actually mad about is the law, and they are using Meta as a scapegoat.
But at the end of the day E2EE is the best solution here. Don’t give private data to others, they can’t be trusted because they can be compelled by the law.
And this is one thing that people don’t seem to understand about Lemmy et al. If you post messages (including DM’s) on any one host, that message will be duplicated to any federated hosts. In most cases the only encryption would be in transit, so all it takes is for one of those hosts to be in a jurisdiction where the local authorities can seize the data, hackers can infiltrate poorly secured server, etc
If you are worried about the privacy/security of your data, it’s not really any safer here then on Reddit or Facebook etc. It may be more resistant to corporate influence but at the same time a kind citizen running a node is less likely to have money to fight legal action and warrants.
Yes. You really should treat anything you post on Lemmy (or anywhere else that isn’t E2E Encrypted) as public.
This is also why Lemmy recommends against using Lemmy direct messages and recommends Matrix with E2EE instead.
For the murder example, remember Apple being in the news for not providing the FBI access via a backdoor in the OS to the San Bernardino shooter’s phone? There were plenty of people on both sides of that argument saying they should or shouldn’t comply. That’s why it’s essential for E2EE to maintain privacy
If the oberstgruppenfuhrer of the schutsstaffel came to your house and asked where the juden were hiding and had a valid order, would you show them the attic?