Unencrypted chat history is a prime target for police

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.

          • IlllIIIlllIlllI@programming.devEnglish
            02·
            1 year ago

            However, campaigners note that Meta always has to comply with legal requests for data, and that the company can only change this if it stops collecting that data in the first place. In the case of Celeste and Jessica Burgess, this would have meant making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the default in Facebook Messenger. This would have meant that police would have had to gain access to the pair’s phones directly to read their chats. (E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)

            I swear it’s like you can’t read. This is pretty simple stuff. They aborted a 28 week old fetus (which would be an illegal act in pretty much every state and every place in the world), burned and hid the body, and discussed it over an unencrypted platform. The owner of said platform is legally obligated to turn that info over.