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Thanks, Snowden! Now All The Major Tech Companies Reveal How Often They Give Data To Government

This article is more than 10 years old.

Graphic credit: David Lada.

Google has been pumping out a transparency report for years, telling its users how often the feds and local law enforcement ask for information about its users. Up until this year, it was one of the few companies that did so. Then NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden happened. Amid allegations of programs like PRISM and the intel community having backdoor taps to the country's most popular Internet companies -- allegations the companies denied -- Silicon Valley's heavyweights started using transparency as a damage control tactic. Yahoo, Apple, and Facebook released transparency reports for the very first time this fall. Now there is a fuller industry perspective on how often these companies get government search queries and how many of their users are affected.

It is only with Google that we get a compelling historical perspective. With the release Thursday of its transparency report for the first half of 2013, it says that requests for users' information have doubled over the last two years. This chart includes all of the companies' reports for the first half of this year, with a focus on the United States.* The companies have released them over the last few months; Google's report was the latest coming out this morning. The chart shows how many requests came in from U.S. feds and po-po, how many users/accounts were included in those requests and the percentage of requests for which the companies actually handed over their users' data.

The challenge now is that the companies release their information in slightly different ways. Facebook and Apple have ranges because they include secretive National Security Letters in their reports (on the condition that they not be too specific about their numbers). We took the uppermost numbers from their ranges. Meanwhile, Google used to have a separate tallying of their NSLs, separate from other requests but has now been asked not to do that; same goes for Microsoft.

That makes the comparison process a little clunky, but one big takeaway is that Yahoo gets far broader information requests from the government than other tech companies, resulting in a comparable number of data requests affecting a significantly higher number of users. And Apple's low number suggest that law enforcement is more likely to go to your mobile carrier than your mobile device maker for intel. Unfortunately, from a data perspective, companies such as Verizon and AT&T don't do transparency reports. When we did get a little peek in 2011, the numbers were pretty astonishing, as noted by Chris Calabrese of the ACLU. "[A]ccording to disclosures they've made to members of Congress, law enforcement sought information from them on a mind-blowing 1.3 million users in 2011," he wrote over at the ACLU blog.

There's currently a bill being pushed by Sen. Al Franken, and supported by the tech giants, that would bring more transparency to government information requests, particularly the number coming from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which infamously ordered Verizon (and likely other phone companies) to hand over call records for millions of customers. The tech companies contend that if users could see how often they're actually getting requests for info, they'd be less freaked out by the NSA stuff.

Sources:

Google

Apple

Yahoo

Facebook

Twitter

Microsoft

* Changed chart included in post initially to reflect Microsoft and Skype numbers for 2013.