Facebook released its first ever transparency report. Colin Stretch, the Facebook general counsel said,
"We scrutinise each request for legal sufficiency under our 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. When we are required to comply with a particular request, we frequently share only basic user information, such as name."
The top 5 countries included U.S., India, U.K., Germany and Italy (below). Surprisingly among these five countries, India had the least amount of requests per million users on Facebook. Germany was the highest with 73 requests per million Facebook users. United States was also significantly high considering they have over 180 million Facebook users.
The following chart represents the countries with total number of requests (Deeper red indicated greater requests). This report is a first by Facebook but is something Google has been doing for years.
The following figure shows completion rate of the requests by Facebook (deeper green representing higher completion rate). Google in April released its transparency report, its 7th since it first started revealing government interventions since 2010.
This attempt by Facebook can be described a way to be at parity in terms of best practices by internet firms but also an attempt to indirectly disclose the increasing pressure by governments to disclose information.
What do you think?
Country
|
Total Requests
|
Number of Users
(in millions) |
Requests per million
|
Percentage of requests where some
data produced
|
United States
|
12,000
|
180
|
67
|
79.00%
|
India
|
3245
|
88
|
37
|
50.00%
|
United Kingdom
|
1975
|
36
|
55
|
68.00%
|
Germany
|
1886
|
26
|
73
|
37.00%
|
Italy
|
1705
|
24
|
71
|
53.00%
|
The following chart represents the countries with total number of requests (Deeper red indicated greater requests). This report is a first by Facebook but is something Google has been doing for years.
The following figure shows completion rate of the requests by Facebook (deeper green representing higher completion rate). Google in April released its transparency report, its 7th since it first started revealing government interventions since 2010.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
This attempt by Facebook can be described a way to be at parity in terms of best practices by internet firms but also an attempt to indirectly disclose the increasing pressure by governments to disclose information.
What do you think?