They already selectively comply: "According to internal statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time".
> As we have said in prior reports, we always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid, no matter which government makes the request. We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so.
(But) they seem to apply legal discretion on which to follow, which is mostly expected. When Meta receives a request/warrant they must use their judgement to determine whether it's legal or not.
Given their track record, it's frightening that we're depending on the "good-faith belief" of Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Google to make such legal decisions that affect people's lives.
But I suppose the alternative could be even worse, where they comply with any and all government requests for data, regardless of legal validity and requirement.
From the article:
> Goldman indicated examples where internet services affirmatively go to court to protect user interest, "but those are the exceptions." "There's thousands of requests for every one of those cases"
They can, however, decide “this is worth pushing back against” vs “this is not worth pushing back against” - that 30% represents the number of times that Meta’s lawyers believed it was worth pushing back and they were proved correct
A much more informative statement would be:
"We turn down about 25% of all requests"