Facebook owner Meta defended itself, noting the court’s order “no mention of abortion at all”. (file)
San Francisco:
Facebook sparked outrage over the compliance of US police probing abortions, saying the platform would be a tool to stop the process.
The criticism stemmed from media reports that the social networking giant had changed the key to messages to criminally accuse a mother of her daughter’s abortion.
Such warnings came after advocates struck down the national right to abortion by the US top court in late June because big tech companies hold a slew of data on users’ locations and behavior.
Jessica Burgess, 41, was accused of helping her 17-year-old daughter terminate a pregnancy in the midwestern US state of Nebraska.
She faces five charges—including a 2010 law that allows abortions only up to 20 weeks after fertilization.
Betty faces three charges, including one of concealing or leaving a corpse.
Yet Facebook owner Meta defended itself Tuesday, noting a Nebraska court order “not to mention abortion at all,” and came before the Supreme Court’s highly divisive decision in June to overturn Roe v Wade. , the case which provided for abortion rights in the United. State.
Logan Koepke tweeted, “This sentence appears to imply that *if* the search warrant mentions abortion, there would be a different result. But of course that is not true,” tweeted Logan Koepke, who Do research on how technology affects issues such as criminal justice.
Asked about handing over the data, the Silicon Valley giant pointed to its policy to comply with government requests to AFP when “the law requires us to do so.”
Nebraska’s sanctions were adopted years before Roe was overturned. Some 16 states have outright restrictions or limits on the early weeks of pregnancy in their jurisdiction.
‘Cannot release encrypted chat’
For tech world watchers, the Nebraska case certainly won’t be the last.
“This will continue to happen for companies that have vast amounts of data about people in the country and around the world,” said Alexandra Givens, CEO of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.
She noted that if companies receive a legal request duly issued under a valid law, they have strong incentives to comply with that request.
“Companies must at least ensure that they are insisting on a complete legal process, that warrants are specific and not a fishing operation, that searches are treated very narrowly and that they inform users So that users can try to push back,” Givens added.
META did not provide a Nebraska court order to AFP. The police filing asked the judge to order the company not to tell Burgess’s daughter about the search warrant for his Facebook messages.
Police Detective Ben McBride wrote, “I have reason to believe that notifying the client or client of the issuance of this search warrant may destroy or tamper with evidence.”
He told the court that he began investigating “concerns” in late April that Burgess’s daughter had given birth prematurely to a “dead baby” they allegedly buried together.
Advocates noted that in addition to not using Meta’s products, a surefire way to keep users’ communications out of government hands would be for them to be automatically encrypted.
Meta-owned WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption, which means no access to company information, but that level of privacy protection isn’t the default setting on Facebook Messenger.
“The company never said it would not comply with a request from law enforcement in an abortion-related situation,” said Caitlin Seeley George, a campaign director for the advocacy group Fight for the Future.
“If users can rely on encrypted messaging, then Meta won’t even be in a position where they can share conversations,” she said.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)