Government agents from 74 countries requested information on about 38,000 Facebook users in the first half of this year. About half of the requests came from authorities in the United States, the company said today.
Facebook is among the latest companies to reveal data showing how often governments seek information about its registered members, following Microsoft and Google 's disclosures in the wake of the NSA spying scandal .
Facebook and Twitter have become established as communication platforms for activists and, as a result, the two companies have become targets of various governments. During the anti-government protests in Turkey in May and June, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called social media “the worst threat to society.”
At that time, Facebook refused to provide information about the protest organizers to the Turkish government.
The data published today show that Turkey submitted 96 requests for 173 users. Facebook announced that they provided some information in 45 of those cases, but did not disclose details.
[ads2]Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, said in a post, "We are required to comply with certain requests, and often only share basic user information, like name."
Facebook representative Sarah Feinberg said that the company gave no information regarding Turkey's protests.
“The data included in the report concerning Turkey pertain to requests for child disappearances and applications for the imposition of emergency law”, she said.
The company announced that it plans to start publishing this data more frequently.
But after all these revelations about NSA surveillance, what is the point of publishing data from government requests? Who can trust numbers that come from companies that received compensation from the NSA?
