Facebook's Message Encryption Was Built to Fail

The information is frightening. Fetal remains were exhumed from a rural burial plot as a result of a police raid. When police dragged off a 17-year-old Nebraska girl and charged her and her mother with self-administering a miscarriage, they were armed with damning documents they could only get through incompetence and cooperation of Meta.

For this family, the intimate conversation between a mother and daughter in the days surrounding an alleged abortion will be devastating. Police used information from the company to apply for a second search warrant after obtaining a warrant for the girl's Facebook data. quotes from the pair's Messenger conversation, such as "Are we starting it today?" and "Ya the 1 pill stops the hormones...u gotta wait 24HR 2 take the other." The closing statement: "remember we burn the evidence."

Law enforcement will be able to get more evidence if they have a search warrant. Police were able to prove the value of searching the girl's home because of the records they got from Facebook. The second warrant allowed them to search the family's home, as well as collect electronic devices, medication, and other records. The mother and daughter are accused of crimes.

Facebook was an early target for an investigation. Billions of users rely on the platform, a repository of many fleeting and self-incriminating thoughts. Messenger creates a false sense of privacy for users because they know that anything they post on Facebook is likely to be seen by the world. Meta staff and anyone with a valid warrant can see most of the messages. It was designed to fail, and that is by design.

The Meta employees were promised that the company would use encryption. The reality is that it doesn't do anything like that. The one investigation in Nebraska that was launched before the Dobbs decision was the only one of its kind in the country.

Users have the option of opting in to Messenger's support of encryption. This isn't an easy, one-time switch, and it's difficult to keep up with everyone you communicate with. Once you opt in to the secret conversations feature, Facebook will create a new message thread that will cause you to split your messages in two. There is a huge mess.

It doesn't do anything to protect months and years of previous messages. The majority of messages will be exposed because of the barriers created by Meta. It is easy to accidentally switch to unencrypted chats once encryption is in place. Meta is built on dark patterns and uses highly engineered products to shape user behavior, so it makes sense that the company doesn't want user conversations to be secure.