this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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It would also be literally illegal for Facebook to have not done this. They were given a legally binding warrant.
If you honestly would personally go to jail rather than comply with a warrant, that speaks pretty highly to your credit, but I don't think most people would find Facebook to be particularly culpable here. Facebook Messenger does actually offer an encrypted messaging service that, to my knowledge, has never been turned over to law enforcement because it is technically impossible for them to do that. That isn't the default setting though, and it's unfortunate that the people involved here weren't aware of it.
Just to be very clear, these laws are reprehensible. However, my anger is largely reserved for the politicians and voters responsible for them. It's a pretty big ask to demand someone personally risk jail time by refusing to comply with a valid warrant.
This would be more compelling point if FB were a person capable of going to jail and/or did not have a history of taking the user-hostile side of privacy situations, regardless of whether the law agreed with them.
This right here is why I personally believe FB deserves and flak they get from this situation. They could avoid the whole conversation about whether they should turn over the conversations if they made it so they couldn't. They've chosen their data mine over user privacy, and people are right to judge them accordingly.
Facebook may not be a person, but there are people within Facebook who absolutely can and would be held personally liable for refusing to comply with a warrant, up to and including going to jail.
That Facebook Messenger isn't E2E encrypted definitely is something that can and should be criticized, and they could absolutely do a lot more to educate users on how safe their information is or isn't. On the flip-side, to their credit, WhatsApp is, by default, E2E encrypted. I'd honestly be curious how much value they really get out of Messenger not being encrypted, since if it's really that high, the value from WhatsApp would be significantly higher.
I'm not saying that this is the only reason - because I'm sure they do get some financial value out of it as well - but if you wanted to be charitable, you could say that users generally expect Facebook Messenger to be equally available across devices with full message history, which isn't really feasible when you're signing messages with device-specific keys.
And? It's not like they've ever given a shit about the law when they want to do something that benefits them.
Unjust laws aren't worth following, and Facebook has the power to fight them. They choose not to.
I'd genuinely be curious what you'd do if police showed up to your door with a warrant ready to take you to jail if you didn't comply.
Maybe you'd actually refuse, I don't know. But I think there are a whole lot more people who want to think that they would refuse and suffer very real consequences of it than would actually do it.
Thanks to Citizens United, corporations are people. But people are not corporations.
They do not have an army of corporate attorneys, nor do they employ lobbying firms to buy political support, nor do they have enormous wealth to fall back on. People simply do not enjoy the protections corporations do. Yet its regular people who frequently take a stand against wrong, and not multi-billion corporations.
Facebook/Meta, a corporate with tremendous resources, made promises about defending access to reproductive healthcare in a post-Roe world and it should be questioned for failing to keep their word. Getting personal (like you just did with @Kichae) just shifts responsibility away from facebook/meta for its actions.
Regardless, there are very much actual people within Meta that can and would be held legally liable for refusing to comply with a valid warrant, up to and including going to jail.
I agree that there are plenty to things to criticize Meta for. They could do a lot more to educate users about what privacy they do or don't have and the legal consequences of that. They could direct more people to Messenger's private mode, which is end-to-end encrypted. I don't think the act of complying with a warrant is something that I would really hold against them though, because 99% of people would do the same thing.