The countries have every right to legally prosecute their residents for breaking the local law. This doesn&#x27;t mean that everybody worldwide has a duty to assist this prosecution. Even more, there are many cases (e.g. those I listed above) where a honest person should not cooperate but hinder and obstruct this foreign legal prosecution as much as their own local laws allow.<p>Whatsapp has a duty to protect their user&#x27;s privacy. Unless they receive a binding legal order from <i>their</i> authorities (in Whatsapp&#x27;s case, USA) it is entirely right to ignore nonbinding requests from judges in Brazil, Thailand, Iran or everywhere else. Simply submitting to out-of-jurisdiction authorities is not due process, it is sharing personal data with third parties without the user&#x27;s consent which (IANAL, IMHO) is legal in USA but would be prohibited if, for example, Whatsapp was headquartered in EU.<p>In your examples, the listed companies (or their appropriate subsidiaries) are subject to those laws because they are headquarted there, those laws <i>are</i> their local laws exactly unlike the nonexistent legal relationship between Whatsapp and Brazil.<p>Some countries will have bilateral agreements to obtain evidence from abroad - a process on how e.g. Brazil law enforcement could cooperate with USA law enforcement to get a request that has some legal force in USA (and vice versa). In the absence of that, a provider should side with their users privacy and ignore foreign requests as a policy.