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29 March 2024

Did your govt seek your Facebook details?

Published
By Vicky Kapur

Facebook has gone public. No, not again on the stock market, but with insights into the requests it receives from governments across the world for details of users’ Facebook accounts, and how many did it grant access to specifically in the first six months of 2013.

The world’s largest social media site says it will, from now on, publish this information on a regular basis – it is, actually, supposed to that by law now.

Nevertheless, the list makes interesting reading.

The US, as believed, tops the list of governments seeking details of users’ Facebook accounts, but guess which country comes second.

It’s India, with 3,245 requests covering 4,144 user accounts. Facebook says it complied with 50 per cent of the requests.

“Transparency and trust are core values at Facebook. We strive to embody them in all aspects of our services, including our approach to responding to government data requests. We want to make sure that the people who use our service understand the nature and extent of the requests we receive and the strict policies and processes we have in place to handle them,” says Colin Stretch, Facebook General Counsel, in the report.

The US of course tops the list of requests by a wide margin – Facebook revealed that America sought details on about 20,000-21,000 user accounts through 11,000-12,000 requests within the first six months of 2013.

That averages to daily requests for access to about 116 user accounts by the US government alone. Facebook says it complied with 79 per cent of US requests, which would amount to approximately 16,590 users having their account data ‘compromised’.

At less than 18,000 user accounts data requests, every other country put together sought lesser data than the US.

The UAE does not feature in the report, which means that the country wasn’t among the list of 71 countries that sought access to Facebook users/accounts in the first half of 2013. In fact, among the GCC countries, only Qatar sought access to 3 users/accounts even as Facebook did not comply with any of the Qatari government’s information requests, according to data published by the social media giant.

“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,” Facebook’s Stretch says.

“We scrutinise 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,” he says.

“We hope this report will be useful to our users in the ongoing debate about the proper standards for government requests for user information in official investigations. And while we view this compilation as an important first report, it will not be our last. In coming reports, we hope to be able to provide even more information about the requests we receive from law enforcement authorities.

“As we have said many times, we believe that while governments have an important responsibility to keep people safe, it is possible to do so while also being transparent. Government transparency and public safety are not mutually exclusive ideals. Each can exist simultaneously in free and open societies, and they help make us stronger. We strongly encourage all governments to provide greater transparency about their efforts aimed at keeping the public safe, and we will continue to be aggressive advocates for greater disclosure.”