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.
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?
You’re not telling me Facebook LIED are you? No way I wouldn’t believe it /s
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
Even if you turn it on, they control the end points, so it’s not really any more secured.
End2End encryption is mostly a PR stunt. In practice it’s not hard to go around it. For example:
It reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/