Government Data Requests From Facebook At All-Time High

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Facebook has released its biannual report on government data requests, indicating that total law enforcement requests are at their highest level ever at 41,214 for the first half of 2015. That’s an 18 percent jump over the back half of last year, according to the social network’s publicly available database that began tracking requests two years ago. The company also said it saw a 112 percent rise in content it hides due to violations of local laws.

Though not the only government making requests, the US is leading with a total of 17,577 requests affecting 26,579 users. Search warrants remain the leading request type with 9,737 related requests made by US law enforcement, followed by subpoenas at 5,375 requests. Facebook does not break out request types for other countries, but did point out that France, Germany and Britain also made up a large percentage of the requests and had far more content restricted in 2015. India and Turkey were responsible for most of the content taken down for violating local laws. India had 15,155 pieces of content restricted – nearly triple the amount in the second half of 2014 – while Turkey had 4,496, up from 3,624. The number of Facebook users in India is up nearly 70 million since June 2014, to more than 190 million users.

“Facebook does not provide any government with ‘back doors’ or direct access to people’s data,” wrote Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, in a blog post. “We scrutinize each request we receive for legal sufficiency, whether from an authority in the US, Europe, or elsewhere. If a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back hard and will fight in court, if necessary.”

Facebook isn’t the only company that discloses this type of information. Twitter, Google, and Amazon, as well as large telecoms and ISPs like Verizon and Comcast, all disclose government data requests.

Government access to personal data from telephone and Web companies has become a contentious privacy issue since former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed surreptitious surveillance programs, causing the technology industry to push for greater transparency on government data requests, seeking to shake off concerns that they are working with the government and violating user privacy.