Facebook Gave Police Data to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion. What’s next?
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Facebook Gave Police Data to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion. What’s next? This week, reports broke that Facebook/Meta gave data to police in Nebraska for the purpose of prosecuting a teenager and her mother for an abortion. This data included the teenager’s personal data and messages between her and her mother concerning her health and consideration of an abortion.
While you might expect that such sensitive conversations would be private, you would be wrong -- at least on Facebook/Meta and in Nebraska.
The State of Nebraska is building its case against the teenager and her mom based, in part, on evidence from the pair’s private Facebook messages, which were turned over by Facebook/Meta in response to a search warrant. For more information on the data Facebook was required to deliver under the warrant, including the conversations, context, and detective’s affidavit, see the following articles:
Facebook/Meta is not entirely at fault; it would have no lawful choice but to comply with a search warrant. In its (recently updated) Privacy Policy, Facebook/Meta even discloses how it responds to such legal requests. A link to that Policy follows:
https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy/
But Facebook/Meta doesn’t clearly warn that its messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted. In its most recent version of its Privacy Policy, Facebook/Meta could even be perceived as implying the opposite under its “Information We Collect” heading, explaining: “We can't see the content of end-to-end encrypted messages unless users report them to us for review,” and then providing a link to “learn more.”
A curious Facebook/Meta user who reads the Privacy Policy (and all of its updates), then clicks to “learn more” is redirected to a page, https://www.messenger.com/privacy, which contains options for adjusting certain privacy controls. On the page, Facebook/Meta professes, “We’re dedicated to making sure Messenger is a safe, private, and secure place for you to connect with the people who matter.” But Facebook/Meta puts the burden on its users to activate “tools that allow [them] to stay in control, secure [their] account[s], and stay safe on the platform.” In our view, this seems like a sordid displacement of responsibility, especially in the context of the latest news from Nebraska.
Leaving aside the dreamy possibility that Facebook/Meta would ever make privacy a default setting, we’ll urge users of Facebook/Meta to follow a simple rule: Don’t Post or Message Anything on Facebook that You Don’t Want the Police or the Public to See. Period. If you have already posted or messaged anything on Facebook that you hope will be private – or if you have a child who has –delete all that you can, and never use Facebook again.
The following are links to Facebook’s instructions regarding how to delete an account, and a Wired article on the same subject:
Notice your Facebook/Meta account will not be deleted for at least 30 days (to give you time to change your mind) and deletion may take 90 days to accomplish.
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Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a boutique law firm dedicated to data privacy and protection, cybersecurity, the Internet and technology. Open the Future℠.