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Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by JRepin@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

498 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] patch1@lemmy.fmhy.ml 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I thought messenger was end-to-end encrypted, at least according to Facebook. How were they able to hand over the chat logs? The messages should be encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted with user's password, which Facebook doesn't store.

What am I missing?

[–] Sophie@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You’re not telling me Facebook LIED are you? No way I wouldn’t believe it /s

[–] patch1@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Actually that page suggests that they can't access it. They'd never passed the security on it if that page was lying and they don't encrypt it. Clearly there must be some kind of mechanism they can use to decrypt it for law enforcement. The technicals of that are what I was actually interested in from my original comment.

EDIT: Oh my God I just figured it out. It's not enabled by default. You have to explicitly turn it on per conversation. That's terrible

[–] jabjoe@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago

Even if you turn it on, they control the end points, so it's not really any more secured.

[–] Xcf456@lemmy.nz 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Presumably they maintain full access because they control both ends. The encrypted part would stop others intercepting messages. At least that's how I've always read it

Edit: I'm wrong, end to end does exclude even the app provider from seeing messages. So yeah, either not enabled or they lied

[–] mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

To add to other replies, proprietary apps like messenger can also have backdoor access to your messenger app, where the messages are stored decrypted. I.e. maliciously taking the chat history from either ends of the end-to-end encryption.

[–] ghariksforge@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

End2End encryption is mostly a PR stunt. In practice it's not hard to go around it. For example:

going after unencrypted backups (such as in google drive)
compromising or seizing your device
forcing the app developer to leak the private keys
forcing you to turn over the information by threatenening you with not cooperating.

It reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/