Facebook and Google hand over user data, help police prosecute abortion seekers(businessinsider.com) |
Facebook and Google hand over user data, help police prosecute abortion seekers(businessinsider.com) |
Unless they change the laws and suddenly you have something to hide.
Or that hey, this power will never be abused because the system won't allow it, and those in control will always have our best interests in mind.
Don't collect more data than you have to, limit the power of any systems you implement, and always design things under the assumption your enemies will take control of it in future.
That is basically the opposite of what these companies do, and their business models rely it.
Some people realize we live in a surveillance dystopia with corrupt government, and others have not yet realized it.
This is great advice if you want to design Good systems, but under barely-regulated capitalism, those who design Good systems will be out-competed and put out of business by those who design Profitable systems :(
But back then it seemed like a distant and improbable scenario - I objected to his statement more on point of principle than out of any realistic sense that it was things were going to get that bad in the near future.
Turns out they did.
(before anyone says it - yeah. Back then there were probably already enough examples of law enforcement overreach - not to mention the decades-long injustice of the "war on drugs". I need to learn to be more cynical)
I am trying to understand this perspective. I was there and nothing seemed improbable or remote. The remoteness was merely a function of technical & economic conditions. Historic precedents, domestic and foreign, past or near present, all pointed the same direction, underlining high probabilities.
Pessimism is rarely the correct inclination, with the exception of questions concerning freedom, power, security, and control. It is appropriately rational to question and highlight worst case outcomes in such cases.
This same pattern is happening yet again ('surprise!') with generative AI. Maybe it is necessary to assure that 'yes, this technology is very cool' as red flags are raised.
It is a very simple thought, backed by unassailable historic evidence: Humans enjoy lording it over other human beings. We should never create systems that permit a tiny tiny subset to realize such base desires. A very simple idea, truly.
When you pass mass surveillance laws you are trusting the people in power now, but also the future people in power.
This framing can make you think about many laws differently.
Discussions on surveillance and misinformation often involve people advocating for granting more power to the government to prosecute who they believe violate their value system, unless the value system somehow changes and now you become the criminal. As an example, this is why breaking E2EE with backdoors to stop pedophilia, revoking immunity to social platforms for users' speech and the like are bad ideas - some day your values will become abhorrent, and the same tools that you used against others will be used against you.
My distaste for corporate stalking is, if I'm perfectly honest, at least partly selfish feelings of discomfort in losing what privacy I still have, but it is mostly concern for what some will use information about others to enforce.
The article seems to imply that the big social media companies should selectively comply with a valid warrant based on what crime the accused has committed.
I think you should either have problem with the entire procedure or agree that the procedure is valid.
Firstly, can you even prosecute a woman for abortion? Aren't they legal?
Secondly, if the abortion is illegal, it's not unusual for the state to prosecute someone when the investigation of that person reveals other crimes.
What would you propose instead? That any evidence of secondary criminal activity uncovered during an investigation of the primary activity be ignored?
Abortion legality varies by state in the US. This is a recent development.
I wouldn’t expect to be prosecuted, or even investigated, for typing “how people get away with bank robbery” into Google. Or for watching The Dark Knight.
In case you've been living under a rock for the last while: several American states have banned abortions[0][1] after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. The federal government failed to implement any laws to safeguard access to abortions so overturning Roe vs Wade was all that conservatives needed.
Some states have exceptions for rape and incest, some don't. Texas even offers a sizeable bounty for reporting abortions. This has already resulted in medical care being refused to women carrying stillborn children and other pregnancy complications fatal to either the mother or the child out of fear of prosecution.
As for secondary criminal activity: I agree, if the police finds other illegal acts during a legal investigation, they should be allowed to act on that. This is the proof that the whole "if you've got nothing to hide" narrative surrounding state surveillance is dangerous.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-ro...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law_in_the_United_Sta...
Doesn't that fly in the face of metas own claims to not be able to?
BI seems to be implying that abortion shouldn't be treated as a crime in places where it is a crime.
Abortion was explicitly legally protected for 50 years and only became a crime in some localities last year. There aren't many "crimes" like that.
In states where it was illegal it may not even be ex-post-facto for them to prosecute for events that took place prior to last year's supreme court ruling.
Anyway, the real takeaway should be that businesses should not be collecting this kind of data in the first place. If they don't collect it, then they have nothing to turn over.
Murdering the unborn was once legal everywhere until it wasn't. It became illegal in some parts of the country and will eventually become illegal everywhere. One day we will look back and think how obvious it is that murdering the unborn is wrong.
A better option would be something like Briar which hides IPs via Tor.
Meta the company hates this and is spending money on ads trying to get people to use WhatsApp with end to end encryption for things like this.
There seems to be a disconnect between data being collected from a terminal, how rich that data can be, and what it can be used for. If you use a digital keyboard your every keystroke can, and probably is being logged - we used to call this spyware, now even the keyboard app on your phone has clipboard sync (and it's built into Windows too!).
People need to be aware for example when activating javascript (and most don't know what that is), how much the various APIs are collecting and storing, which is used to build a "fingerprint" of your device.
The web (and digital devices in general) is actively hostile, anyone who uses noscript can attest to that and anyone who goes onto any news media website and opens "network" via web dev console can see how much data is flying to god knows where to do god knows what.
If you want to defy the state you need to be a master spy, this means actually thinking how you research, and probably learning a thing or two from Snowden (are you on wifi? open hotspot? is your device logging anything, if so, what? do you need to destroy the device afterwards incase it gets forensically inspected? If you could read /var/log what would be there and would it reveal anything about your situation? If you can't read /var/log then your device is actively hostile and not worth the risk).
Privacy is effort, and, in these cases, the 'seekers' are not spending enough effort on hiding their tracks and they are like fish in shallow water, easy pickings.
The ones who are clued up are not the ones who end up making the press, because they know exactly how to cover their tracks, and make it impossible to prove or disprove a fact, which, thankfully at least at this moment, is how justice works (for the most part).
PRISM?
Serious question. I thought that was still a thing.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/27/digital-data-roe-wade-repr...
The users signed the EULA and know what their rights are.
"we also know that social media isn't likely to stand up to illegitimate law enforcement requests, because of the fact that they fear their own liability, or because of the fact that it's just too costly to stand up."
That said, I don't know if I'd feel comfortable discussing my medical history over Gmail or Facebook, even if ostensibly "private."
I thought pyrography (for example) was illegal in China
No, they'll just dutifully record all activities in a dossier, until something interesting presents itself to be leveraged against you, or until they decide at a later date that what you do is distasteful.
Don't use Facebook or Google.
Regarding your conclusion, leaving FB and G is not even the hardest part. The hardest part is that your network probably won't follow.
They should probably be using encryption within the chat itself (and not, you know, speaking in plain English) to add another layer. Perhaps changing the keys frequently via an agreed method (thinking about how to do that safely without leaving another trace) to render older messages 100% undecryptable.
But yeah, chances are all of that data is going to be accessed and they agreed to it! It's right there in the privacy policy people don't bother reading
The default setting is still unencrypted backups, though.
The story is Roe v. Wade overturned due to heinous corruption of the US political process in favour of the religious right and free market libertarians.
>Pakistan asks Facebook and Twitter to help identify blasphemers
>Companies approached in effort to locate Pakistanis at home or abroad so they can be prosecuted or potentially extradited
I'm sure I'll be flamed into oblivion here, but it is worth considering the headline from the perspective of the anti-abortionists. If we cannot empathize or attempt to understand those who disagree, what is the point of having a discussion?
"FB and Google hand over user data, help to prosecute baby killers"
Reasonable people can disagree on the topic of abortion or at what stage of pregnancy it is acceptable. HN is not the place where I want to have that discussion. It has already been explored at depth elsewhere.
It's one thing to make providing abortions illegal. It's quite another thing to prosecute the women.
Laws of the land change, like everything else in this world.
1. The creation of domestic appliances that dramatically shorten house hold chores (washing clothing is a main one).
2. The move from the bulk of work labour being less physical.
Both meant there was less time needed to maintain a household, previously that was a full time job that seemed unpaid. And that women had suitable roles available in the work force where as manual labour would mean they likely couldn't compete with men for employment.
While society gained extra productivity from these changes, it's debatable if households gained financially as it was likely a powerful force in the mid century inflation.
I'd place centralised schooling in that list of things which freed up more labour. Contraceptives are recognised for this too, and I'm sure it lead to a sexual liberation at least.
Honestly, given where the productivity gains of women in the workforce went (not to the actual workers), we'd probably have a better quality of life if only half the household adults worked.
We should rethink how we share our data and the costs that it has.
I don't think Meta and Google are to blame here. Other than encouraging us to give them our data unprotected (as well as trying to syphon up as much as they can get their hands on in the background).
That bracketed "as well as" is a 'king huge "other than".
Even your smaller "other than" that is stated as such, is enough to make the premise that they carry no blame seem pretty silly to me.
What concerns you about this?
That is the problem: we have nothing to hide until someone changes the law. Suddenly those things that were legal yesterday become the crimes of today.
What is legal and acceptable in one place is illegal and abhorrent elsewhere.
Until we have a homogenous global population and one world government there will be laws you disagree with and wont want enforced.
Edit: Genuinely confused by the downvotes here. Anyone care to take the time to explain?
You forgot from time to time. Abortion was legal in all of these places 1 year ago.
They already selectively comply: "According to internal statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time".
> As we have said in prior reports, we always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid, no matter which government makes the request. We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so.
(But) they seem to apply legal discretion on which to follow, which is mostly expected. When Meta receives a request/warrant they must use their judgement to determine whether it's legal or not.
A much more informative statement would be:
"We turn down about 25% of all requests"
Now, Google, to their credit, claims[1] they now purge information about users who visit abortion clinics or related places, but ... that isn't very reassuring. Even if they excise some related portion of user data, they still have enough other data to figure it out once law enforcement has access -- and there's more stuff the law would be after than just abortion! You'd be expecting Google to play whack-a-mole with every latest "activity that needs protection"!
But yes, you're correct, it's far too late to identify what Google's doing wrong after abortion is illegal, and after Google has that data about you, and after they're served with a warrant on that basis.
[1] This article https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/18/google-workers-sign-p...
which cites this blog post: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/protecting-pe...
Facebook and Google are not to blame here; they're simply doing what the law demands of them. These companies are not above the law, they cannot refuse warrants. Blame Nebraskan and American federal law for this situation.
With a bit of luck, this situation will make these companies put more priority into E2EE. Had these conversations been done through Signal, there was likely nothing to be found or handed over.
The article disagrees:
> One legal expert said social platforms may cooperate with police even if not legally required to.
Regardless, you are right these companies are morally culpable for not implementing E2EE.
Companies just hand over data when simply asked, they don't even need a warrant.
> It shouldn't be up to Facebook/Google to decide what is a crime, nor in which cases wiretapping should be allowed.
Could mean either:
1. FB/Google should be prevented from deciding what is and is not a crime. They don't set the laws.
Or
2. FB/Google aren't setting the laws, so can't be blamed when complying with those laws.
Maybe it's my sleepiness, but I just cannot decide which of the two statements were intended by GP.
If they want to do business in a certain nation, they'll have to comply with the laws of that nation.
Are you proposing that companies be above the law? That they should be able to pick and choose which laws apply to them?
They could opt-out of being forced to comply with or defy authorities.
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I agree with you in principle but AFAIK "actual laws" have never been necessary when the SCOTUS has declared a Constitutional right. Individual states don't need to codify a right to keep and bear arms, or freedom of speech or religion, nor can they choose to re-enable slavery or segregation, because those have all been decided at a higher level.
The story is Roe v. Wade was overturned due to the US political process working exactly as it as designed to, with the religious right telegraphing their play for decades, and progressives doing nothing about it except trying to fundraise on the aftermath.
More seriously, there has been substantial opposition to the anti-abortion long game but it's not easy to secure abortion rights in Nebraska from NY without federal law. But Roe made securing abortion federally a little moot and maybe not the hill a slim majority wants to die on when they have other priorities. Then they didn't get justices to retire when they could be replaced, although it's questionable that would have been allowed to happen anyway. Bad strategy but not complete inaction. They have been trying to oppose laws in states but gerrymandering means that the Right gets unfairly more representation in those states like Georgia.
For men, it was always "pro-choice", child support and paternity tests are a recent invention (and don't compare with how hard it is to raise a kid)
If men got pregnant you could have your abortion together with your haircut
But I now see that things don't need to get comic-book bad for Schmidt's statement to be dangerously wrong.
Relatively more liberal than the Roman era and more decentralized than our current era.
Facebook is improving E2EE according to their blog: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/expanding-features-for-end...
Suddenly making people happy and freer is fine. Suddenly making them miserable and taking away their longstanding rights is another matter.
It's the same thing with women getting the right to vote in 1920. Women themselves wanted it and lobbied for it!
Social mores and laws can change pretty quickly, in decades.
What if they don't do business in that country but simply don't block that country?
I did, and my understanding is that any secondary crimes uncovered during an investigation of a crime can be pursued.
What about that do you disagree with?
This part.
Given their track record, it's frightening that we're depending on the "good-faith belief" of Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Google to make such legal decisions that affect people's lives.
But I suppose the alternative could be even worse, where they comply with any and all government requests for data, regardless of legal validity and requirement.
From the article:
> Goldman indicated examples where internet services affirmatively go to court to protect user interest, "but those are the exceptions." "There's thousands of requests for every one of those cases"
They can, however, decide “this is worth pushing back against” vs “this is not worth pushing back against” - that 30% represents the number of times that Meta’s lawyers believed it was worth pushing back and they were proved correct
You dramatically underestimate the number of both men and women who’re against abortion.
Because it's very easy to be against abortion and having somebody else raise the child you should have been responsible for.
"Legislating from the bench" is considered poor form in legal circles for a reason.
And it's somewhat unclear to me why this should be a federal issue at all... isn't murder a state issue?
That's an odd framing for a self-described "pro-abortionist" to use, but no, obviously federal law against murder exists[0].
But of course the question of whether or not abortion is a matter of murder, fundamental bodily autonomy or both is a quagmire not worth getting into. Not that it's relevant to Roe v. Wade, or its appeal, because that rested on the question of the existence of a fundamental right to privacy and stare decisis.
I mean, read the dissenting opinions on Dobbs[1]. I think a good case is made there as to why this shouldn't be an issue left to the states, and why Roe wasn't repealed because it was bad law, but because the court was stacked with ideologues who were opposed to Roe for religious reasons.
You should be at least as angry about that as Roe itself, if not more so because that represents a far more egregious corruption of the system, but I suspect you aren't.
[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1111
[1]https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/24/read-supreme-court-...
I don't agree with this "technical" interpretation at all. Nobody would have said in 2020 that technically abortion is illegal in many places. Just because the Supreme Court changed its mind doesn't wipe everyone else's minds.
Roe ruled that certain state laws criminalizing abortion could not be enforced. But Roe's ruling was found to be unconstitutional and invalid. It was invalid the day Roe was ruled, not the day it was overruled.
Those same states laws criminalizing abortion, which were on the books before Roe and are still on the books, were always legal and enforceable because Roe never was. That is what the court determined last year.
LOL. What exactly, numerically, does "Plenty" mean, and how does it compare to "all"? Of course, both the majority and minority of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs opinion are legal scholars, but they disagreed vehemently with each other.
Your response sounds very Orwellian to me. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
We have always been at war with Oceania.
It's why they were offering women several thousand dollars in reimbursements to travel for an abortion. Those employers were unwilling to provide the same amount to women who wanted to keep their baby.
Isn't that contract killing now?
Edit: Thanks for downvoting a honest question!
From my reading of the article this is purely speculative, however. There's no actual assertion that FB/Google are doing more than complying with valid warrants, other than observing that this appears to be the case with other types of warrants. So I guess one could fault these companies for not fighting tooth and nail over these warrants in a way they wouldn't for other warrants, but that seems like a weak condemnation.
Apple publishes statistics about their shared data, and whether data shared was shared because of a warrant or request. The company very often just hands over data without a warrant, a simple request is all that's needed. I doubt they are unique in that regard.
Maybe social media companies should fight tooth and nail over every data request, but somehow I think most people don't want this. The same people who would be outraged at Facebook turning over data in an abortion case are probably the ones who are fine with say Facebook turning over data related to the January 6th protestors. Is there actually a non viewpoint-based principled stance behind the outrage, or is this just an instance of working the ref to your team's advantage?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_burning
The result is quite beautiful, but I can see why some countries might want to regulate or prohibit it. Personally, I think people should be allowed to take such risks if they choose to do so.
It might surprise you, but people who don't live in America probably don't follow, nor care about the politics going on in specific states.
> As abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced (...)
So claiming ignorance is not a valid point.
I'm not sure this principle is a good one. Almost everyone had probably broken a law or two (yes, this meane there are too many bad laws, let me know if youve an idea of how to solve that), so by investigating someone for some random thing they haven't done you've got a good chance of finding something. This de facto gives imprisonment powers to the police and prosecutors office, giving plenty of opportunity for corruption.
Well, that's not going to work out well - LEOs investigating a shoplifter should just ignore the corpse lying in the backyard?
It's just no going to fly - crimes are crimes, and if you want a crime to be not-a-crime then follow the legal process in your jurisdiction to make it so.
I, in fact, do. All laws come with baked in sunset dates. No exceptions. Furthermore, it's clear there is a need for some sort of secondary legislature or sub committee of the primary dedicated to the repeal of bad law. Then again, if that worked, we wouldn't necessarily be in the problem we're in.
The problem with this, I imagine, is that when the sunset dates comes around, and a new political party is in control, they will let the new law lapse and laws will be ping logging back in forth given they even get the votes to go back in effect.
This would be terrible for very important laws like the Civil Rights Act.
What’s the sunset date on these abortion bans? Is it more than 9 months? Is there any reason to believe they will be repealed at their sunset date? How long do we tolerate the injustice? What do you tell the woman who wants an abortion today?
Bad laws aren’t a mechanical problem. They’re a people problem. Repealing law is something the current legislatures are perfectly capable of. The hard part of repealing “bad law” is defining “bad”. A secondary repeal committee would have the same difficulty as our existing legislature.
If you don’t like a law then go do something to change it. In case you doubt the feasibility of this recall that is exactly what happened with abortion.
Companies are simply enforcing the law, right or wrong.
You have some arguments for that I'm not aware of perhaps?
Whatsapp is famous for doing this before, and then Facebook killing this for "regulatory concerns". I don't know for sure, but the previous owner of Whatsapp and founder of Signal implied that Facebook got threatened by states into doing that.
But FB/Google/Amazon/... are the tip of the iceberg. The companies really used for "enforcing the laws" (and for using very harsh measures against individuals just to make some government department's job a little bit easier) are banks.
https://www.taxsamaritan.com/tax-article-blog/reasons-the-ir...
(note the wording here: "the IRS has full authority to". They can do this at will. This process has been used to cause problems for political opponents as well. Nobody seems to care)
Now... They could comply with the law by not hoovering up as much data as they do, thereby becoming useless to both advertiser and law enforcement alike....
But that jeopardizes their business model.
And given Google et.al. actions in other avenues against these laws, it’s sad they aren’t challenging them.
And as their data was harvested, consumers were told: Relinquish your private data to us, it's a fine and normal thing to do, we are trustworthy corporate citizens and privacy is a concern expressed only by those who wear hats of tinfoil.
There is no respect for the context in which the data was generated.
It will sure seem retroactive to someone who might have acted differently so the data wouldn't be available to be handed over, if the current laws were in action at the point they could have done something to avoid the data being collected¹².
--
[1] "Generated" is too benign a word here IMO, hence using "collected" instead
[2] "inferred" might be a better choice as the data could be incorrect³ but that still seems to imply less agency than the companies have in their very deliberate stalky behaviour
[3] so something made up, not a truth collected
As it happens the Dutch authorities were pretty good with collecting ethnicity and confessional data in the inter-war period, then the very bad guys came along and we know what followed.
Data collection at scale and especially data centralization has always been a mistake, too bad many of the livelihoods of us here depend on exactly that.
WhatsApp doesn't have an open source client so verification is difficult. However, if someone were able to break the encryption, I'm sure it'd be in the headlines of most newspapers.
One exception is WhatsApp business: I don't know the details, but Facebook offers a service where they will do some chat automation for your business which means they must receive the keys.
In terms of security: key changes are automatically accepted. They are hidden by default, but by toggling a setting every time a user updates their keys, a message will be introduced into the chat. QR code key validation has been in the app for years now, though I doubt many users are using the feature.
If they're not end-to-end encrypted, they're engaging in a lot of deception to indicate that they are.
If you think you need E2EE you can really only achieve that on an open system you control and have intimate knowledge of. You can’t trust precompiled binaries.
Something something trusting trust.
This isn’t a problem technology can solve. Women shouldn’t need to be information security experts just to ask questions about their own bodies.
What does Snowden have to do with Facebook? I'm asking in good faith.
Checking to see if investigations include evidence from messages on these platforms excepting:
Messages sent by the user to someone who distributes them further
Or investigators getting control of the phone.
---
WhatsApp stands up to that test.
Do no obvious counter-examples spring to mind for you regarding that? ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention
https://edri.org/our-work/a-beginners-guide-to-eu-rules-on-s...
The companies profit from this data, but at this point they no longer have a choice: they have to collect the data or stop offering services in a lot of geographical areas. The point that they can avoid it by not collecting it was valid some 15 years ago, but no longer.
One of the main objections of companies is, by the way, that most governments refuse to pay the sometimes extensive development and infrastructure costs for this, instead just threatening the companies with (often illegal) measure to force their compliance.
The classic form of retroactive application of laws would be if someone performed an action, the law was backdated so that action becomes illegal and the performer becomes a criminal.
In this case we're talking not about direct action as the action is implied via the data collected. So if the action was performed before the backdating of the law but the data was collected after the backdating, is the performer a criminal?
So from the data, an action is "inferred".