14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has followed several other companies and has revealed the number of requests for user data it gets from US authorities.
Like all the companies that revealed this data in the past few days, Yahoo is only disclosing requests in aggregate. In fact, it's not even saying how many users are affected.
"We are disclosing the total number of requests for user data that law enforcement agencies in the U.S. made to us between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013," Yahoo said on its new Tumblr blog.
"During that time period, we received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests. The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations," it added.
What Yahoo did different, though, is address requests made during the last six months. Apple also released data for the timeframe, but other companies that made similar disclosures, like Facebook or Microsoft for example, released data for the last half of 2012.
However, just disclosing how many requests it got in bulk, i.e. along with legal and public requests from local or state officials, doesn't mean much. The number tells us nothing about how many secret requests these companies got, which is what people are actually interested in.
Yahoo, like everyone else, urged the government to allow it to disclose the number of secret FISA requests it gets. The company also promised to start issuing regular reports like these from now on.
"Democracy demands accountability. Recognizing the important role that Yahoo! can play in ensuring accountability, we will issue later this summer our first global law enforcement transparency report, which will cover the first half of the year. We will refresh this report with current statistics twice a year," Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell wrote.