Facebook Privacy: Government Requests For User Information Increases 27 Percent in 2016

The latest transparency report from Facebook, released on Wednesday, reveals a considerable uptick in requests from governments around the world during the first half of 2016.

According to figures from Facebook, government requests for user data from the social network jumped from 46,710 in the first half of 2015 to 59,229 in the first half of 2016, representing a 27 percent increase.

The full report reveals 23,854 of those requests—about 40 percent— came from United States law enforcement entities. Facebook produced data in more than 80 percent of those cases but according to the company, 56 percent of requests from U.S. law enforcement contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited the social network from notifying the user.

While the increase in requests from governments may raise privacy concerns—especially when not disclosed to the user who is subject to the request—there was a significant decrease in the number of content restriction requests received by Facebook.

According to Facebook, it received just 9,663 requests to remove content between Jan. and June of 2016 as compared to 55,872 requests in the first half of 2016. The 83 percent drop, the company said, was primarily because of a massive amount of requests to block a single image from the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France.

In its report, Facebook disclosed for the first time the number of requests it has received from governments to preserve account data pending receipt of formal legal process. During the first half of 2016, the company received 38,675 preservation requests for 67,129 accounts.

According to Facebook, it creates a snapshot of an account at the time of a request but doesn’t disclose that information until it receives a “formal and valid legal process.”

“We apply a rigorous approach to every government request we receive to protect the information of the people who use our services,” Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, stated in a blog post. “We scrutinize each request for legal sufficiency, no matter which country is making the request, and challenge those that are deficient or overly broad. We do not provide governments with ‘back doors’ or direct access to people’s information.”