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Facebook had good reason to remain silent on this question. Legal experts said that even if the nature of the case had been explained in detail, the company would have had no choice but to comply.
Prosecutors and local law enforcement have strict rules that must be followed when accessing individuals’ personal communications or local information to strengthen legal cases. Once a judge grants a request for users’ data, tech companies can do little to disobey those demands.
That’s why social media platforms, telecom companies and other Internet data brokers must collect data if they want to save women seeking abortions from helping them go to court in states where the practice is illegal, advocates say.
“If the order is valid and targeted at an individual, the technology companies will have relatively few options when trying to challenge it,” said Koren McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group. “That’s why it’s so important for companies to be careful about what they collect, because if you don’t build it, it won’t come.”
After a Supreme Court reversal, how tech companies handle user data is coming under fire from privacy advocates, politicians and their own employees. Roe v. Wade In June, making abortion illegal for millions of Americans. Privacy advocates worry that tech companies could use huge troves of user data, from private messages to real-time location data to search results, to prosecute those who obtain or facilitate abortions.
Despite repeated attempts in Congress, there is no comprehensive federal law protecting data privacy in the United States. On Thursday, the government’s high-tech watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission, announced it is investigating whether to create new federal rules to address privacy issues surrounding health and environmental data.
“Some discussion around recently Dobbs Sam Levine, director of the FTC’s Office of Consumer Protection, said the decision highlights what many people have been saying for a long time: consumer privacy is not just an abstract issue.
In a Nebraska indictment, Celeste Burgess, now 18, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, were charged in June with concealing the death of a person, among other charges, after authorities allegedly tried to improperly bury the remains of a stillborn fetus. Jessica Burgess is accused of performing an abortion on a fetus that was more than 20 weeks old. Abortion is legal in Nebraska up to the 20th week of pregnancy; Citing court-certified medical records, Celeste Burgess was estimated to have been more than 23 weeks pregnant when her fetus was terminated between April 22 and April 29.
To bolster the case, a law enforcement official asked the court to allow Facebook to forward private messages between the women. In the filing, the officer told investigators the women texted them on Messenger about Celeste’s pregnancy. In the messages, the two women discussed how to take pills and how to get the “thing” out of Seletes’ body, according to court records.
For a court to issue a warrant for such conversations, experts say, the request must meet two conditions: evidence of a crime and a narrowly tailored request that details when the exchange took place and who was involved.
“Under that warrant, they can go to the phone company and say, ‘Give me what I want,'” said Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman.
A similar bar exists for government requests for environmental information, Richman said.
Once tech companies are served with a court-ordered data request, they have few options. Comply with the legal request or be in contempt of court and may be fined.
Companies are more likely to be successful in challenging court orders if the requested information comes from multiple people rather than individuals, McSherry said.
In March, a federal judge said Virginia authorities violated the constitution when they used Google location data to locate people near the scene of a 2019 bank robbery. The ruling found that geo-fencing, a technique known as geo-fencing, violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches when the agency asks a company to identify someone whose phone has been in a specific location during a specific period of time. He gave information to the police about the whereabouts of many innocent people who were not suspected of the crime.
Many privacy advocates say the abortion case simply reinforces what they’ve been saying for years: tech companies should collect the least amount of data that can be used in abortion lawsuits. Or messaging apps and device makers may implement end-to-end encryption, meaning data is scrambled so that outsiders and even the company can’t read it.
“It’s clear to users of these devices that they don’t have to worry about who can access their private conversations,” said Caitlin Seeley-George, campaign director for the privacy advocacy group.
“It’s also good for the companies, because they’re not caught in this situation and have to try to defend themselves for their actions. They can say, ‘We didn’t have the capacity to share the information.'”
Cat Zakrzewski contributed to this report.
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