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Facebook’s Policies and Government Request Reports – Social Tech eDiscovery
Two weeks ago, we took a fresh look at Twitter’s Law Enforcement Policies and their latest Transparency Report to show government requests for data, then last week (for the first time), we looked at LinkedIn’s Privacy and Law Enforcement Data Request Guidelines and Transparency Report. This week, we’ll take a look at Facebook’s policies and Government Request Reports.
We originally looked at Facebook’s law enforcement policies back in 2010 – this policy was updated extensively by the time we looked at it again in 2012. The good news is that the policy has remain largely unchanged since our last look – the main difference is the option to submit records requests online as well as via email, snail mail or fax (you still have to be a law enforcement officer to submit the request).
Facebook, similar to Twitter and LinkedIn, posts biannual Transparency Reports, however the company uniquely calls them “Global Government Request Reports”. Facebook began publishing these reports last year, and posted the first one on June 30, 2013 for the first six months of 2013 – the latest report available is for the last six months of 2013. The main page gives you an interactive map to click on to select a continent, then you can select a country for which get a specific report. Or, you can download the entire report as a comma-separated values (.CSV) file to review all of the countries at once.
The downloaded entire report covers: 1) The countries that requested information from Facebook about their users, 2) The number of requests received from each of those countries, 3) The number of users/accounts specified in those requests, and 4) The percentage of these requests in which Facebook was required by law to disclose at least some data. It also includes instances in which Facebook has removed content that governments have identified as illegal (e.g., posts denying the holocaust are illegal in Germany). If you select the country individually via the interactive map, you also get a breakdown of the first three numbers for the types of requests (e.g., Search Warrant, Subpoena, Emergency Disclosures, Other).
In the latest report, the US had 12,598 requests for user data (44.8% of the total of 28,147 worldwide), referencing 18,715 user accounts (47.6% of the total of 39,320 worldwide) and some data was produced in 81.02% of the requests. The next highest country was India (3,598 requests involving 4,711 accounts). We’re number one!
Facebook, like other social media platforms, continues to push the US government to allow more transparency in releasing specific numbers and types of national security-related requests. Colin Stretch, Facebook’s General Counsel, made an all-encompassing comment about the topic: “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.”
You can get more information about the reports here and look at their FAQ page here.
What other sites have reports? We’ll take a look at that tomorrow.
So, what do you think? Have you needed to request information from Facebook for litigation purposes? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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