I was CEO of a small startup called Network54 with about 4 million monthly users. It was a forum hosting service.
The early 2000s were the heyday of lawsuits. People would say something about someone and if that someone was rich they would sue. It happened often.
The attorneys would sue us, the domain registrar, the ISP, everyone.
Often the things said were true. But they would sue to find out who the people were.
People selling Ponzi schemes, CEOs of public companies trying to find what union employees to fire, it was all over the place.
We would fire to quash every time. File to move venues to CA which has anti-slap laws. Depositions in DC. It was very distracting and expensive.
Never lost. Made some people really mad that they didn’t get their way.
Now for criminal things, the opposite, sorry. Two person operation and the FBI walks in your office with a warrant, then yes sir let me see the warrant first. If no warrant, then sorry sir come back with a warrant but we will take this as a notice to soft delete not hard delete content.
I've been in the situation of being instructed to pull unredacted logs for a subpoena before when I really did not think it was appropriate. I was just an IC but I talked to a lawyer about it. Since the company I worked for was not willing to fight it, my options were pull the logs, quit the job, or possibly catch a contempt charge.
It seems like everyone who is not the CEO or maybe the legal dept has much more constrained choices in this situation. I also wonder if the timeframes matter here, how much things may have changed in two decades. My experience with it was only a couple years ago, and I was surprised they chose not to fight it but presumably they know more about the chances of success than I do.
Yahoo got sued for not fighting it long enough to give a chance for the third party to quash on their own. If I remember correctly, they lost. But the case had a good argument of fairness to the little people whose data is just being given away and people fired or harassed because of it.
Anyhow, we worked with Public Citizen on a couple of cases and they were willing to fund to Supreme Court in order to set good precedent.
This is nonsense. I’ve personally been involved in these things, and fought to protect user privacy at all levels and never lost.