Surprising Facebook government requests figure from SA

Facebook released its Global Government Requests Report on 27 August 2013, revealing that it received 14 government requests involving 9 users in the first 6 months of 2013. What is surprising is that Facebook did not release the information in a single SA case.

Facebook’s first Global Government Requests Report shows which countries requested information from Facebook about their users, how many requests were received about how many users, and the percentage of requests where Facebook released information.

“We have stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests,” Facebook said in its report.

“We believe this process protects the data of the people who use our service, and requires governments to meet a very high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any information about any of our users.”

Facebook said that they scrutinize each request for legal sufficiency under their terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each request.

“We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests,” said Facebook.

Facebook complied with a high percentage of requests, especially in the case of the United States (79%) and the United Kingdom (68%).

In comparison Facebook complied with none (0%) of the South African government requests for user information.

The following table provides an overview of some prominent countries listed in the Facebook Global Government Requests Report.

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