Turns out the U.S. government leads the world in lurking — and not just in an accidentally-liking-your-pic-from-2009 way.
On Tuesday, Facebook released its inaugural Global Government Requests Report. The report detailed which countries requested information from Facebook about its users, the number of requests received from each of those countries, the numbers of users or user accounts specified in those requests and the percentage of those requests in which Facebook was legally required to disclose at least some data.
The U.S. topped the list, with between 11,000 and 12,000 requests for 20,000 to 21,000 users’ information. Second place went to India at 3,245 requests for 4,144 users’ information.
Most of the requests, the report stated, are related to criminal investigations such as robberies and kidnappings. Furthermore, the type of information requested in most cases was pretty general such as names and length of service. However, some of the more detailed inquiries asked for IP address logs, credit card information, email addresses and the stored contents of any account — messages, photos, videos and wall posts.
While the report was mostly clear about the types of information being disseminated to governments and how Facebook determines whether to grant these requests for, in some cases, highly personal user information, the U.S. was totally weird about a few things.
For one, the U.S. was the only country listed without an exact count of requests.
In addition, an Information Week article noted that the Facebook report was unclear on just how many of the requests were for law enforcement versus intelligence gathering.
“We have reported the numbers for all criminal and national security requests to the maximum extent permitted by law,” Colin Stretch of the Facebook General Counsel wrote in a Facebook Newsroom post. “We continue to push the United States government to allow more transparency regarding these requests, including specific numbers and types of national security-related requests.”
Boom, shade!
Information Week reported in June that Google and Facebook were pressuring the government for more transparency in regards to law enforcement’s ability to access private user data, possibly to rebuild its users’ trust cache.
Privacy International, a charity advocacy group, weighed in on what steps the U.S. government needs to take next in a press release yesterday.
“We are living in a world where governments exploit over-permissive, vague and outdated laws with impunity,” it said. “What is needed is a new strong legal framework that all governments must abide by. Until then companies like Facebook are left with the burden of having to determine what information may be ‘lawfully’ demanded by each country ... This is too much to ask of these companies, and too great a trust to be placed in them.”
A version of this editoral ran on page 6 on 8/29/2013 under the headline "Lurk team: U.S. gov’s handling of Facebook data"
