Unencrypted chat history is a prime target for police

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.

  • RagingRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Can’t you just look at the data in. The database though? No need to login as the user. Surely not every field is hashed

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      That’s a good point and I don’t know the answer to that (my guess is encryption is involved), but as other people have pointed out, Facebook has an alternate encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, so Facebook is clearly capable of not being able to access its users’ messages.