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Our Right To Privacy Is More Important Than We Realize
How Facebook releasing messages between a mother and daughter ended in a criminal case
In 2019 the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans didn’t believe they could get through daily life without companies collecting their data, and that 79% of them were also “concerned about the way their data is being used by companies.”
A recent court case illustrates how Facebook messages can be used to help bring criminal charges against individuals. On July 20, 2023, 19-year-old Celeste Burgess was sentenced to 90 days in jail for illegally concealing human remains.
The case was first widely reported in the media in August of 2022, when headlines blared that a Nebraska teen and her mother were being charged in a case that “involved obtaining their Facebook messages.” Burgess used abortion pills that had been ordered by her mother, Jessica Burgess, to have a medically managed abortion earlier that year.
While investigating what they thought was a case of a stillbirth that mother and daughter had sought to hide, Nebraska police noticed Celeste Burgess checking her Facebook messages to confirm dates she was being asked about. Investigators then served Meta (the parent company of Facebook) for data from the accounts of…
