London: Facebook has pledged to publish regular reports detailing government requests for user data, as it reveals that UK authorities asked for information on 2,337 users in the first half of 2013.
Its first global government requests report published on Tuesday includes requests from the police and child protection agencies, as well as national security bodies. It claims that 38,000 requests were made globally.
The report shows that Facebook complied with 68 per cent of the 1,975 UK government requests, the majority of which typically involve identifying contact details and locations of suspects in criminal cases, missing persons, as well as information related to terrorism under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the Guardian understands.
Requests do not involve handing over log-in details to the police, and Facebook has not received any financial compensation for its compliance work in the UK, though it is legally entitled to payment. The company rejects requests which do not comply with local law, international standards or Facebooks terms.
In the US, Facebook is able to indicate how many requests are criminal and how many related to national security, while in the UK requests are not broken down.
Facebook, along with Google and other web companies, is trying to push the focus of controversy over the NSAs gathering of consumer data back onto the US government. The company, which is a publicly traded company with a market capitalisation of $100 billion (Dh367 billion), has said it intends to regularly publish a transparency report including take-down 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, Colin Stretch, Facebook general counsel, said in a blogpost.
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.
Facebook has a dedicated European law enforcement team based at its offices in Dublin, it said the size of the team depended on the workload and it uses outside counsel.
The US accounted for more than half the global requests, which demanded information on up to 21,000 users. Indian authorities requested information on 4,144 individuals, Germany 2,068 and Italy 2,306. Requests were refused in several countries including Bangladesh, Egypt, South Africa, Russia and Qatar.
We have stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests, said Stretch.
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 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.
Did you know that the National Security Agency in the US has paid millions of dollars to internet companies to cover the cost of providing consumer data? Guardian
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