>A Nebraska woman has pleaded guilty to helping her daughter have a medication abortion last year. The legal proceeding against her hinged on Facebook's decision to provide authorities with private messages between that mother and her 17-year-old daughter discussing the latter's plans to terminate her pregnancy.
If you have information you don't want others to know, then don't tell your secrets to a multi-billion dollar pseudo-governmental organization that has even less data collection protections than the governments it serves. There's more you should do, but that's a big one.
If you have secrets at all, don't send them through any ActivityPub conversation.
People on Mastodon make this mistake quite often, tagging someone they're talking about, or realising that the person they tagged now receives a copy of their conversation.
This is a massive issue on top of the lack of end to end encryption. Both servers receive plaintext copies of the messages exchanged. I'm sure mastohub.ai is a safe server, but how can you be sure they'll never be bought out or hacked?
If you want to federate and share secrets, try something like Matrix or XMPP. They make it significantly more difficult to read your messages.
this is also what always bothered me about twitter. some friends of mine has absolutely private conversations on their public twitter feeds (nothing sensitive but stuff like sharing shopping lists). my fear always was that if i join twitter they would use it for private conversations with me insteads of using email or something else that isn't public for everyone.
That's true -- and my more detailed threat modeling post has a big public service announcement saying "don't share information on the fediverse that you want to keep secret" -- but there's a lot of information that's not "secret" that people do want to share on social networks.
> If you have information you don't want others to know, then don't tell your secrets to a multi-billion dollar pseudo-governmental organization that has even less data collection protections than the governments it serves.
that's such a naive egoistic apathetic world view it baffles me
sometimes I wonder if posting stuff like that just don't understand how humans and societies work, or just don't care because "they know better".
What a terrible article. Well relevant to the discussion of data privacy, it completely misconstrues the case. This Behavior would have been illegal against under the row standard as well given that the team was more than 7 months pregnant and the two attempted to incinerate the body to destroy evidence
I mean yeah, but also, the actual fault is on the side of people who literally voted for this. And campaigned for this. And spend years trying to put the right people on supreme court so that this happens.
The abortion in that case was sufficiently late term that it would have been illegal before Roe was overturned. It also would have been illegal in most of Europe, most of South America, and most of Asia.
>A Nebraska woman has pleaded guilty to helping her daughter have a medication abortion last year. The legal proceeding against her hinged on Facebook's decision to provide authorities with private messages between that mother and her 17-year-old daughter discussing the latter's plans to terminate her pregnancy.
If you have information you don't want others to know, then don't tell your secrets to a multi-billion dollar pseudo-governmental organization that has even less data collection protections than the governments it serves. There's more you should do, but that's a big one.