There's a couple of interesting problems in Law that come up, as a result of this.

In order to explain them more effectively, let's suppose that for the purposes of discussion that you are Mark Zuckerberg and that you run Facebook...

OK, so when you start Facebook, you make a promise to users, and that is, that their data that will be confidential, that is, only shared with parties that they give explicit permission to share that data with, and no one else, never.

In other words, that you will respect users' privacy.

This becomes part of the agreement you make with all new users, it becomes part of the user agreement -- the CONTRACT you made with them.

You engineer the system such that it will respect those rules, and you assume that nothing possible can go wrong.

But then later on, you realize that all of this was not as foolproof as you had once thought.

That's because Government, via it's Police and Lawyers, and it's NSL's and other legal instruments -- are now requesting information from you about your users, to solve criminal cases, but they're asking you to keep silent about user data you give them, basically because you were coerced by their Lawyers.

You begrudgingly turn over the data and keep silent about it, that is, you respect the Law -- but deep in your mind, in your conscience -- you know that something about this whole thing is very, very wrong.

You see, the problem that now occurs, legally, lawfully, morally and ethically -- is now that basically YOU'VE VIOLATED THAT CONTRACT YOU MADE WITH YOUR USERS.

You broke that CONTRACT.

And you also destroyed that trust.

You told people that a future set of events was going to happen (that their data would be kept private), that they relied on in making the decision of whether to give you their business or not, to give you their eyeballs or not, and YOU BETRAYED THAT TRUST.

YOU BROKE THAT CONTRACT

You didn't do it intentionally -- you had no way of knowing what future circumstances would turn out to be, but nonetheless, those circumstances resulted in YOUR BREACH OF CONTRACT.

That's because explicity or implicity or in both ways, YOU AGREED TO THAT RESPONSIBILITY.

THAT YOU WOULD PROTECT USERS

And because of circumstances, YOU DIDN'T

But nonetheless, YOU AGREED TO THAT RESPONSIBILITY.

Now, if you understand all of that... then here's the next piece of understanding...

The sealed court records -- are no different than Facebook user data in the above example.

The Court -- had a CONTRACT -- implicit, explicit (heck, I'll let Lawyers figure it out) -- TO KEEP THOSE DOCUMENTS SEALED.

Even though it was a third party, a set of circumstances, that caused the breach of that CONTRACT,

THERE STILL WAS A BREACH OF CONTRACT.

See?

Even though the players and the parts and the modes and the mechanisms are different, THERE STILL WAS A BREACH OF CONTRACT.

The Court contracted, CONTRACTED that it would keep these records confidential (compare Attorney-Client privilege), and they basically BROKE THAT CONTRACT.

What you have here is grounds for a super-big-ass CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT.

I'll let all of the Lawyers (aka "Bar Association Members") attend to that.

My point is simply this:

If you're running an online service in this day and age, if you have users, you cannot, CANNOT make any guarantees of privacy to them. Your best bet is to be honest and tell them that you'll take all the security best practices you can on your end, but at the end of the day, even that is no guarantee against a data breach, wanted or unwanted, done via lawful or unlawful means, executed by the Government or hacker group, or whomever.

YOU CANNOT GUARANTEE PRIVACY IN THIS DAY AND AGE.

It would be simpler just to be honest and up-front to all of your users and simply tell them that, EVEN IF as a result of this they stopped doing business with you, or using your website, or whatever.

You'd get a lot more sleep at night -- if you had a clear conscience...

I quote to you the 3rd Delphic Maxim:

"Surety brings ruin".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_maxims

If the Court (or any other entity, Government, Corporation, Person) makes promises to anyone else, implicitly or explicity, while those promises might not be written down, those promises constitute a CONTRACT.