This screenshot doesn’t indicate whether they were complying with a lawful order or volunteered the information unprompted.
A lot of folks here seem concerned with it being lawfully ordered or voluntarily handed over. Which is kinda outside the point in my humble opinion. It’s tantamount to asking if a slave catcher had a license.
Both the government and Meta are in the wrong here. And it’s a very shitty moment for Meta to start caring about fines and regulations.
It’s absolutely not outside the point and a totally relevant question. Regardless of your stance on the issue, compliance with legal procedures is absolutely essential to a functioning society. Calls for companies to defy the law just to support your favored political position are asinine and dangerous.
Or they could have… You know, foreseen their responsibility in safeguarding their users data, implemented end to end encryption and not mishandled their users data in the first place.
Data privacy and human rights are my favored political positions to be fair, so I do view the acts of the government and Meta to be immoral. And as such, I would say companies and governments imposing immoral laws is dangerous (and not in an asanine way).
I’m not calling for companies to defy the law to support my position anyway. I’m calling for companies to do the right thing and not store this kind of data in the first place. And I’m saying the fact that Threads does is wrong, and makes the platform not worth using regardless of if they were complying with a court order or not.
All right, fair enough, but I still think questions about whether or not Meta handed over the data in response to a legally enforceable request from the government vs. as a voluntary act based on their board’s political views or something is a valid one. Meta doing it on their own certainly is politically-motivated “snitching,” but if they’re just complying with a government order, then the problem lies more with the government in this instance than with Meta.
I’d like to hope that in the future we ban these sorts of data collection things, but…I’m pretty pessimistic when it comes to this sort of thing.