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Peace & Justice
Opinion
When Compliance Is Not Enough
Imagine a government orders every smartphone manufacturer operating in its country to install a government-built app on every new device. The stated purpose seems legitimate: combatting device theft, telecom fraud, and cybercrime by flagging stolen devices and tracking fraud. But the app runs at the operating-system level of the smartphone, potentially giving the government access to information far beyond what is needed to prevent theft or fraud, and the government has already exempted itself from data protection laws.
What should an in-house lawyer advise the company to do?
That question stayed with me after a discussion at Salzburg Global’s International Law Fellows Network program in June 2026. The final panel addressed the responsibility and leverage of corporations and their in-house lawyers in supporting the rule of law. It exposed the limits of the old vocabulary companies use when confronting government overreach: "comply" or "resist," "engage" or "withdraw.” For global technology companies, the harder question is often what action to take when a government demand seems simultaneously legal, plausible, and dangerous. I work as in-house litigation counsel at a technology company. While my daily work is not typically dominated by questions about my responsibility to the rule of law, my experience at Salzburg Global challenged me to take this seriously.
I left Salzburg convinced that our role as lawyers cannot simply be to determine whether a government demand is lawful, but we must also ask what complying with it will enable. We need to consider whether a company can use its technology, public voice, and legal process to limit the risk of governmental abuse.
Withdrawal may sometimes be the only principled response to a weak or politicized legal system. But leaving a market is not morally neutral either, as it assumes the space a company leaves behind remains empty, which it often does not. When a company whose devices facilitate free speech and include built-in privacy protections exits a market, it's usually replaced by an alternative that lacks those same safeguards. The question, then, becomes what responsible engagement requires while the company remains.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights offer a useful framework. They recognize that businesses must respect human rights, independently of whether the state is meeting its own obligations. Principle 23 matters most here: Where domestic law conflicts with internationally recognized human rights, businesses should seek ways to honor those rights as fully as possible while complying with the law.
For an in-house lawyer, that means the question of “Is this legal?” is only the beginning of their analysis.
It does not mean advising a company to defy a legitimate government mandate. It means asking what discretion remains and how the company can use it responsibly. For a technology company facing this dilemma of a government app requirement, there are three important forms of leverage: product design, transparency, and legal process.
Design Can Limit Overreach
A product built on data minimization, on-device processing, and strong security protections can limit what software, government-mandated or otherwise, can reach.
A potential response is for the company to design the app’s operating system so that it is limited to what is necessary for its stated purpose. It might, for example, prevent access to messages, media, or location data unrelated to its stated anti-theft purpose. Through intentional design, the company can comply with what the government has legally required without voluntarily creating broader surveillance capabilities.
Transparency Matters
A government requiring an app to be installed onto every device isn't asking a company to hand over data it already holds; it's asking the company to help build the collection mechanism itself. Transparency enables the company to publicly acknowledge the public’s concerns and dispel concerns that the company simply complied.
In addition to technical safeguards, the company should explain externally what they have been required to do, what access they have granted, and which parts of the mandate they have refused. Pushing back publicly means saying, in plain terms, exactly where a mandate exceeds its stated purpose. That could happen through a transparency report, public filing, public comment, or press statement.
This combination of technical limits and public disclosure lets a company satisfy the mandate without quietly enabling government surveillance that would violate fundamental rights.
Challenging Through Legal Means
To challenge government demands that exceed their stated purpose, companies can use legitimate channels, including appellate review, administrative review, or other judicial mechanisms that the domestic legal system provides. These processes are meaningful even when the odds of winning are slim. Legal proceedings keep a government's justification on the record and subject to scrutiny, instead of letting a broad grant of power pass unchallenged simply because the affected company complied quietly.
That scrutiny is itself part of the rule of law, which depends on citizens and courts actively testing a government's stated reasons against its actions. A company willing to publicly object to government overreach and pursue solutions through the legal system available to it, is upholding the rule of law.
Technology companies should maintain a steadfast commitment to secure technology, products that structurally resist overreach, and a willingness to challenge mandates in the public forum. That's how companies can operate globally while offering products that are tools of empowerment, not instruments of state control.
The Day-To-Day Rule of Law
Salzburg reminded me that defending the rule of law happens in the small, day-to-day tasks of corporate counsel, not just in the work of diplomats and human rights lawyers.
For in-house lawyers, rule-of-law questions can arise in decisions that look like ordinary corporate work: how narrowly a government order is interpreted, how a product is designed, whether objections are public, and whether a mandate is challenged.
We need to continuously ask ourselves a question that goes beyond whether a government demand is technically lawful: What will our compliance make possible, and what can we do to place meaningful limits around it? Because whether technology becomes a tool of empowerment or an instrument of control can depend, in part, on how we answer it.
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Jami King, who attended the Salzburg Global International Law Fellows Network session on “The Future of the Rule of the Law in a Fractured World” in June 2026. Jami’s participation was made possible thanks to the generous support of William J. Reckmeyer and Joan Reckmeyer through the Reckmeyer Family Fellowship.
