I don't think the article is intended as a direct criticism of Facebook specifically. The purpose of the article is "to show in shocking detail how abortion could and will be prosecuted in the United States, and how tech companies will be enlisted by law enforcement to help prosecute their cases."
The problem is the 3rd party doctrine. The data should not be treated as if it is Facebook's to give away. Instead it should be the defendant that receives the request for their data using the proper warrant process. Instead governments incentivize companies like facebook, google, and amazon to collect all the private data on citizens that the people need to live in the society and then they claim it is no longer the people's data so they have an easy path to obtain it without a balance in place to apply the proper amount of friction to getting that data.
My understanding is that a court order is not an immediate, absolute command with zero recourse or ability to have one's lawyers respond? Surely Facebook could have done something, even if it wasn't ultimately successful?
There are many things that might have been done; if the warrant should not have been served, the best person to challenge it would probably be the defendant (or their counsel). They would likely challenge the admissibility of the evidence. I am not sure what grounds Facebook would have to challenge this warrant, unless it would be improper for them to provide private communications for some reason.
I fully believe abortion should be reasonably legal, and if it were more accessible it may have prevented a lot of the tragedy of this case. But given the details in this article, it seems like this case would be criminal even in that hypothetical world.
The keyword here is “reasonably”. What I hate the most is “lifestyle abortion” when a woman says she’s not ready for a baby, but at the same time treats sex like a cheap entertainment, fucking her way through dozens of guys.
Sex is cheap entertainment, and should be. It feels good, it's your body, why should anyone have any judgements about how you use it. Let me fuck the men and women and non binary pals I want, it doesn't affect you.
One should be able to have sex separate from concerns about having to carry a fetus to term.
I have not read the article (and don't intend to) but this here headline is an astoundingly well-crafted work of attention-catching rage-bait art. in eleven mere words, you get:
- Facebook (fuck em)
- giving collected personal data (fuck that) to
- the police (fuck em) because
- a teen had an abortion (fuck yeah(?))
- and needs to be prosecuted because said teen presumably lives somewhere where this is illegal (fuck em)
once you get used to instinctively breaking these things and evaluating the way they emotionally manipulate you to click on them to read more, it's like "seeing the code" in The Matrix, you don't even need to read the article anymore because you've already parsed the intended emotional payload, and from there you can choose whether or not to digest it.
While it's a clickable headline it isn't near as inflammatory as it could be; "the data" is a very anodyne way to refer to "Facebook Messenger conversation between mother and daughter".
Vice is one of the best at it. Read their comment section on fb. The comments are almost all the gut response they wanted to elicit from the headline. Even in the cases when their own full piece is different.
Purely from a people-programming standpoint, I respect them as masters at it.
It's not just Vice either. But the info-tainment nature of the brand seems to lend itself really well to it.
if someone came up to you on the street frothing at the mouth and ranting overemotionally, using buzzwords and -phrases to try to get your attention and work you up such that your emotional state matches their own, would you stop and listen to what facts they had to convey?