Facebook: Govt. Requests For User Data Up 24% In First Half Of 2014

The whole notion of companies being transparent — or at least as transparent as they are allowed to be — about governmental requests for personal data is still quite new, so it’s too soon to identify trends based on the little bit of information we’re given, but today Facebook said that governmental requests for user data during the first half of 2014 were 24% higher worldwide than they were during the six months previous.

This is according to the latest transparency report from Facebook, which deals with requests from the first six months of 2014. During that period of time, the website received a total of 34,946 requests from governments around the world.

Requests from authorities in the U.S. totaled 15,443 during this time, accounting for around 44% of the global total. These requests from stateside governments involved 23,667 accounts.

Slightly more than 80% of U.S. requests resulted in Facebook handing over some sort of information to authorities.

Search warrants represented the highest number of requests (7,676 request involving 12,230 accounts). These are cases in which a judge determined that there is probable cause that authorities might find evidence of a crime in a user’s account. In these instances, Facebook turned over some sort of data more than 84% of the time.

The type of request with the highest percentage of instances in which data was given to authorities involved pen register/trap and trace requests to intercept real-time info about an account (like the IP address a user logs in from) might prove relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. Facebook agreed to more than 85% of these requests, though they only accounted for about 14% of the U.S. total.

The least successful requests involved emergency disclosures, where authorities were seeking information with the intent of preventing imminent harm to someone. Only 45% of these requests were fulfilled to some degree.

“[W]e scrutinize every government request we receive for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law,” writes Chris Sonderby, Facebook Deputy General Counsel, “and push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests.”

He continues, “While we recognize that governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety and security, we believe all government data requests must be narrowly tailored, proportionate to the case in review, and subject to strict judicial oversight.”

Sonderby cites its ongoing legal battle against authorities in New York, who are trying to obtain information on nearly 400 Facebook users that may be tied to in some way to an insurance fraud investigation.

Over the summer, a court threatened Facebook with contempt if it failed to turn over the data. The website is making an appeal to a higher court, but those warrants have been unsealed and data was turned over.

“We’ve argued that these overly broad warrants violate the privacy rights of the people on Facebook and ignore constitutional safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures,” writes Sonderby. “Despite a setback in the lower court, we’re aggressively pursuing an appeal to a higher court to invalidate these sweeping warrants and to force the government to return the data it has seized.”

One thing we don’t have data on are the number of national security requests made by the government, as Facebook is only allowed to reveal that information in bands of 1,000. So all it can tell users is that it received somewhere between 0 and 999 such requests in the first half of 2014.

Last month, Twitter filed a lawsuit against the Justice Dept., the FBI, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey, claiming that restrictions on transparency reports violates companies’ rights to speak freely.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist