14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone knows that Facebook is extremely popular, especially given its 1.3 billion users who log in every month. Unfortunately, however, Facebook is also quite popular among law enforcement agencies.
The company’s latest transparency report indicates that the requests for user data have increased by 24 percent in the past six month, and nearly half of all the requests have come from the United States. During the same period, the amount of content restricted because of local laws increased by 19 percent.
Starting in January, and up until June, governments have made 34,946 requests for data, most of which were part of various search warrants or subpoenas. Out of the number, the United States is responsible for 14,433 of them, spanning some 23,667 accounts.
According to the social network, Facebook saw it fit to turn over data in about 80 percent of the cases.
“As we’ve said before, we scrutinize every government request we receive for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests,” said Facebook’s Chris Sonderby, Facebook Deputy General Counsel.
Facebook vs. law enforcement
Facebook states that they’ve challenged bulk search warrants issued by a court in New York, demanding the turn-over of nearly all data from the accounts of nearly 400 people, which was, by far, the largest request ever received.
The company states that such broad warrants violate the privacy rights of the people on Facebook and ignore constitutional safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. The company indicates that despite a setback in the lower courts, they’re “aggressively pursuing an appeal to a high court,” hoping to invalidate these sweeping warrants and to force the government to return the data it has seized.
While it wasn’t exactly in response to the recent critics that Facebook and other social networks are being used by terrorists, Facebook’s Sonderby also inadvertently responded to this issue too.
He says that while Facebook recognizes that governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety and security, all government data requests must be narrowly tailored, proportioned to the case in review, and subject to strict judicial oversight.
The company supports recent efforts in the US Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act and hopes that the Congress will also update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to codify the requirement of a warrant to compel disclosure of the stored content of an account.
Just the other day, Robert Hannigan, GCHQ boss, called for US tech firms to start allowing them easier access to people’s data.