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The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

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Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#31

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

sp527 wrote: post #24
washbrain wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.

> Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find political…

Because all of these other than the last one describe living cows which most people think it's ethical to kill and eat?

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#32

Post by nickff »

washbrain wrote: post #25
samfisher83 wrote: post #14

It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.

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.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#34

Post by 331c8c71 »

It's all incredibly sad: the abortion itself, the decision to do it (which could've been avoided in a better society), the ruined lives or at least the psychological burden, the naiveté of using f-ing facebook, the compliance of the meta.

Sad, just sad, and a reminder that the technogical "innovation" (praised so highly here) is (oftetimes) much less about transforming the society and human lives for the better than it might appear from the hyped-up kool-aid spread generously to/by the tech crowd and the general populace.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#35

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

newfonewhodis wrote: post #18

Some points that folks on this thread are missing: 1. This is not a story about when a pregnancy can/should be terminated. 2. The person in this story is a child - 17 years old. Many times, what seems like normal weight gain ends up being a pregnancy. This is especially true for younger/skinnier folks. 3. Remove the hot-button issue - abortion - from this story and consider the implications. Two people were having wh…

> Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation.

They can now be the poster girl(s) for two causes: "more abortion" and "facebook isn't private".

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#36

Post by rcoveson »

washbrain wrote: post #19
belval wrote: post #9

I'll preface this by saying that I am pro-choice, but 28 weeks is late, very late. > Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.

You don't know the circumstances, though. I can imagine dozens of scenarios where someone would be forced or feel forced to wait this long, or experience a change in their life that makes them rethink carrying the fetus to term. The victims here are the two people who are standing trial, and no amount of, "Welllllll buuuuut, it was pretty late... soooo..." changes the fact that two women will needlessly have their li…

But if the same entity had been located outside the woman when it was killed, then it would be another victim, right? What detail about it being in utero makes it an ethical non-entity? The shared blood supply? The fact that it doesn't breath air?

28 weeks isn't even considered a "previably delivery". At that mark it's just called premature. In your ethical system, when does it gain the ability to be a victim?

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#37

Post by washbrain »

rcoveson wrote: post #26
washbrain wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.

> Could the fetus have survived? Much more likely than not at 28 weeks. ~50% viability is like a month earlier than that. > Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Roughly even or better chances of lasting complications. Of course, some percentage of babies delivered at every stage of pregnancy have a chance of lasting complications. You could throw a "who could say" after anything you want.

And you have sufficient information about the parents in this case to say there were no complications factors or social challenges that may have caused those numbers to deviate from "normal"?

My point is you cannot apply the average case to each individual case. You don't have enough data to confidently say "more likely than not" for this case.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#38

Post by mattnewton »

whywhywhydude wrote: post #20

Why vice is highlighting Facebook is beyond me. If a judge gives you a warrant, aren’t you forced to provide the data? Otherwise, don’t you face contempt of court charges and possibly get jailed?

I think because a lot of people have an expectation of privacy in messaging services that is demonstratively not true here. They either think warrants aren’t possible because of some of the noise around different end-to-end encrypted systems, they don’t think a warrant will be issued for cases like this, or they aren’t really thinking about it at all.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#39

Post by Someone »

washbrain wrote: post #19
belval wrote: post #9

I'll preface this by saying that I am pro-choice, but 28 weeks is late, very late. > Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.

You don't know the circumstances, though. I can imagine dozens of scenarios where someone would be forced or feel forced to wait this long, or experience a change in their life that makes them rethink carrying the fetus to term. The victims here are the two people who are standing trial, and no amount of, "Welllllll buuuuut, it was pretty late... soooo..." changes the fact that two women will needlessly have their li…

IMO, the aborted child is the main victim. In all likelihood, it was healthier than the average child born at 28 weeks, and most of those survive.

Yes, there may be mitigating circumstances, and that should affect the severity of any punishment, but from the info I read here, it looks looks highly likely (1) these women are guilty, and because of that it IMO is good that the government tried to find out whether they were.

(1) one way they wouldn’t be guilty is if they neither knew nor suspected she was pregnant for over 20 weeks.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#40

Post by adamrezich »

samfisher83 wrote: post #14

It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.

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.

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