[candiodari]

Companies don't get a choice. The "out" some companies are using is to encrypt everything with keys only on the customer's device. They then provide all data they have, as ordered, on request. This, of course, does not include the encryption key. However, as far as I know essentially only Signal does it these days.

Whatsapp is famous for doing this before, and then Facebook killing this for "regulatory concerns". I don't know for sure, but the previous owner of Whatsapp and founder of Signal implied that Facebook got threatened by states into doing that.

But FB/Google/Amazon/... are the tip of the iceberg. The companies really used for "enforcing the laws" (and for using very harsh measures against individuals just to make some government department's job a little bit easier) are banks.

https://www.taxsamaritan.com/tax-article-blog/reasons-the-ir...

(note the wording here: "the IRS has full authority to". They can do this at will. This process has been used to cause problems for political opponents as well. Nobody seems to care)