Facebook, a social network juggernaut with a billion users, confirmed in a report released this week that the United States and world governments’ demands for user data increased significantly in the first six months of the year. This has been the trend for the government as the social media outlet has revealed these statistics for the past two years.
The company’s bi-annual report is one of the indicators of how interested Washington is in Facebook’s data. What would be interesting is if Facebook actually revealed what the government specifically wanted, but this is prohibited by law enforcement and spy agencies.
Let’s take a look at the numbers:
Government requests for users’ data went up 18 percent internationally in the half of 2015, which is equal to 41,214 accounts. This is up from 35,051 from the second half of last year.
The U.S. government accounted for nearly two-thirds of the global requests with close to 27,000 account requests. Great Britain, France and Germany were also nations that represented a bulk of the requests. India and Turkey were responsible for the most content being taken down for violating local laws.
Experts say the government usually requests basic account information, content and IP addresses.
At the same time, Facebook has taken down more than 20,000 posts and other content aspects that had violated local laws. This number is double from what was taken down in the July-to-December period of 2014. Such restricted content includes Nazi propaganda and images of violent crimes.
Microsoft and Yahoo have also begun to release reports identifying government requests for data they have received and stored.
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