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.

  • Jackthelad@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    This the same company that owns WhatsApp and is so dead against unencrypting messages on that platform? 🤔

    • Monomate@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      35
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      To be fair, if the mother/daughter communicated through WhatsApp they’d not be caught, because it’s an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. But as they chose FB Messenger, they got vulnerable to a court order forcing Facebook to hand over data.

      • preacher37@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        1 year ago

        Is WhatsApp open source? Even Signal I’m a bit on edge, why would you trust WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook?

        • Monomate@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          27
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          WhatsApp was not created by Facebook. It used to be an independent company which major selling point was offering free encrypted messaging to the masses, which was mostly relevant to non-US users as they’re charged for SMS usage more directly (it doesn’t come free and unlimited on most plans).

          It was bought by Facebook in 2014 and by 2016 they implement end-to-end encryption. There’s already various cases of courts around the world trying to compel WhatsApp to hand over messages but they didn’t because they simply don’t store the messages on their servers, and when the messages pass through their servers they’re encrypted by design.

            • Monomate@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              Ops, my bad. I was under the impression the only reason WhatsApp is encrypted today is because they already were by the time FB bought them.

              They paid US$ 20B to buy WhatsApp, and encryption is a major deterrent for them scanning all messages to enhance their targeted advertising business.

                • Monomate@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Maybe you’re right, but I’d be hesitant to say WhatsApp user’s contacts list would be worth US$ 20B.

                  My theory is they bought WhatsApp just because it was organically growing to be the dominant messaging app, and Facebook didn’t want to lose this marked and bought them to squash the competition.

                  • noodlejetski@geddit.social
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    3
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    1 year ago

                    contact list? not really.

                    knowing who they talk to, how often, where from, for how long on average, and, in case of the countries where Whatsapp for Business is popular, what businesses do they spend money at? probably quite worth it.

          • pips@lemmy.film
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            That said, the messages are stored locally on the device or in a cloud backup unless you disable that. If the device is unlocked, the messages are available to whoever has the device.

            • Monomate@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              At this point we’re discussing the mother/daughter screen locking policy. It doesn’t matter what messaging app they use, if they rely solely on Face/Touch ID, the police may force then to unlock their phone anyway.

        • Lukecis@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Signal should check out as safe and private, considering even after getting multiple warrants from various governments they’ve given up next to no data on any of said requests- because they dont store it, the only thing they had is ‘time of account creation, time of last connected to service’.

      • PineapplePartisan@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        E2E only protects data in transit. Unless the pair also encrypted their data at rest, their messages will still be easily accessed in plain text by their cloud backup.

        • AProfessional@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          It supports encrypted backups. Plus that adds legal complication of knowing to and getting data from Google/Apple/etc.

            • noodlejetski@geddit.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              I’m not entirely sure. I think I had to opt in when it came out, but I don’t know if they’ve ever changed it.

            • Terrasque@infosec.pub
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              IIRC it asks if you want to enable backup, and when turning on backup it’s an option to encrypt it with a key or password. So by default there’s no backup at all.