[Terr_]

IANAL but I think bankruptcy-court is an issue.

An agreement to Not Do Evil can be put aside by a judge if it means squeezing money out of the company to the pay creditors, such as by selling the company (and its data-assets) at a higher price.

[newswangerd]

Good gravy... I hadn't even considered that.

I assume end to end encryption would help mitigate this. Breaking E2E encryption would require a client side update that could be hard to implement if the company has already gone belly up.

[Terr_]

Probably, business-as-usual systems and policies make it harder for anyone to argue the "debtor in possession" [0] violated their fiduciary duty to do their best to ensure creditors get paid.

In other words, having a "smash glass in case of insolvency" button might do the job of protecting customers, but a judge could decide it looks too much like a shopkeeper screaming "if I can't have it nobody can" before lighting everything valuable on fire.

[0] https://www.uscourts.gov/court-programs/bankruptcy/bankruptc...