Facebook Report on Government Data Requests

Facebook recently released a report outlining every data request they received from governments in the first six months of 2013. From 74 countries, roughly 38,000 Facebook users had data accessed by authorities. While several countries had between 1000-5000 user/account requests (France, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany and India), the United States made up approximately half the data at more than 20,000 requests. Canada seemed somewhat less concerned throughout the first six months of the year with a mere 219 asks for information.

The Chart below outlines the following:

• Which countries requested information from Facebook.
• The number of requests received.
• The number of user accounts requested.
• The percentage of requests that Facebook had to disclose at least some information (by law).

Colin Stretch, Facebook’s General Council, claims that the website will not release data to governments unless there is a legitimate, legal reason to do so:

As we have made clear in recent weeks, we have stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests. We believe this process protects the data of the people who use our service, and requires governments to meet a very high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any information about any of our users. We scrutinize each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each request. We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests. When we are required to comply with a particular request, we frequently share only basic user information, such as name.”

More details about Facebook’s approach to dealing with such government requests can be found here.

Chart and Image: Facebook

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