[ThinkBeat]

>Facebook and Google comply with the law. >When presented with a valid warrant they hand over the data requested.

The article seems to imply that the big social media companies should selectively comply with a valid warrant based on what crime the accused has committed.

I think you should either have problem with the entire procedure or agree that the procedure is valid.

[lapcat]

> The article seems to imply that the big social media companies should selectively comply with a valid warrant

They already selectively comply: "According to internal statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time".

[madeofpalk]

Purely opinion, but I'm sure a non-trivial amount of government requests for user data are invalid, warrantless, or unfulfillable (contains incorrect information).

> As we have said in prior reports, we always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid, no matter which government makes the request. We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so.

(But) they seem to apply legal discretion on which to follow, which is mostly expected. When Meta receives a request/warrant they must use their judgement to determine whether it's legal or not.

[lioeters]

> only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us

Given their track record, it's frightening that we're depending on the "good-faith belief" of Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Google to make such legal decisions that affect people's lives.

But I suppose the alternative could be even worse, where they comply with any and all government requests for data, regardless of legal validity and requirement.

[smoldesu]

You might be surprised, 70% compliance is fairly low. For comparison, Apple complies with ~90%: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

[madsmith]

And the other 30% is unknown so we can’t say they selectively comply. It’s quite possible the other 30% are invalid warrants, in which case there’s nothing to comply with.

[lapcat]

Social media companies can't decide that a warrant is "invalid". Only a court can decide that.

From the article:

> Goldman indicated examples where internet services affirmatively go to court to protect user interest, "but those are the exceptions." "There's thousands of requests for every one of those cases"

[Shish2k]

> Social media companies can't decide that a warrant is "invalid". Only a court can decide that.

They can, however, decide “this is worth pushing back against” vs “this is not worth pushing back against” - that 30% represents the number of times that Meta’s lawyers believed it was worth pushing back and they were proved correct

[joenot443]

I’m sure you’re aware, but there’s pretty obviously a huge difference between the police requesting info because they want to make an arrest and any other government branch asking Meta for data on anything else. My guess is Meta’s cooperation rate with police would be much higher than 70%.

[ThinkBeat]

Well 100% is more than 70%. So we can if we want to assume that means 100%

A much more informative statement would be:

"We turn down about 25% of all requests"

[misnome]

That says nothing about warrants.

[SilasX]

For me, the takeaway is that they collect and persist too much personalized data about users, and it's a shame that people only start caring when it affects abortion access.

Now, Google, to their credit, claims[1] they now purge information about users who visit abortion clinics or related places, but ... that isn't very reassuring. Even if they excise some related portion of user data, they still have enough other data to figure it out once law enforcement has access -- and there's more stuff the law would be after than just abortion! You'd be expecting Google to play whack-a-mole with every latest "activity that needs protection"!

But yes, you're correct, it's far too late to identify what Google's doing wrong after abortion is illegal, and after Google has that data about you, and after they're served with a warrant on that basis.

[1] This article https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/18/google-workers-sign-p...

which cites this blog post: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/protecting-pe...