Brazil detains Facebook VP after he failed to give up user data

by
in legal on (#15P7Q)
Continued legal issues for companies using strong encryption in their products:
Apple isn't the only company in hot water over encryption. Facebook's VP of Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was detained by police this morning in Brazil after the company failed to comply with a court order to hand over Whatsapp user data, CNN reports. The big problem: Whatsapp (which Facebook owns) fully encrypts messages between users, and it has no records of messages sent. Even if it were to get access to a specific device, the encryption is likely too difficult for the company to crack.
Regardless of whether you are a small outfit like Lavabit or an enormous company like Apple, the government has you in their sites if you stand up for user's privacy.
Reply 5 comments

Fines (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2016-03-02 01:21 (#15PNW)

How can a Brazil court fine an American company?

Re: Fines (Score: 2, Informative)

by fishybell@pipedot.org on 2016-03-02 02:50 (#15PTT)

How can a Brazil court fine an American company?
By having a large market.

If you don't obey them, they can kick you out of their market, and you would lose more money by being left out. Admittedly, this is somewhat difficult to do with websites.

Re: Fines (Score: 1)

by fnj@pipedot.org on 2016-03-02 04:50 (#15Q29)

Define "their market". What would WhatsApp have to gain by having a business presence in Brazil? Why doesn't it just move its headquarters to some place that is not fascist? Why would anybody care where the physical locale of its server and plant are? This is the era of international business, for heaven's sake. I can send PayPal to some guy in China or Switzerland (just arbitrary examples) to buy something. If that something is software, I just get a download license, and there is no issue of importing anything physical. Even if it is hardware (I have done this many, many times), it just shows up in the mail. It very seldom shows any evidence of customs nosiness.

Brazilian and US (and all other) fascists: bite me.

Re: Fines (Score: 3, Insightful)

by wilson@pipedot.org on 2016-03-02 09:32 (#15QKH)

That's a very naive view considering WhatsApp is not simply WhatsApp, it's Facebook. And Facebook needs a presence in Latin America in order to sell ads for example (read: money). Just because you can send some money to a guy in China using PayPal doesn't mean a company can do the same, there are much stricter laws for business. And before you say that they should pull out of a market, yes you can do that but where do you draw the line? USA? China? Brazil? EU? If you continue like that eventually you will be out of a business.

What we (as citizens of these countries) have an obligation to do, is inform our fellow countrymen and try to steer the country away from these kind of policies. After all, politicians are still elected by the majority.