Governments of different countries are increasingly requesting user data from Facebook

Facebook published a report on user data requests by governments of different countries for the first half of 2017. The social network has done such reporting within its project “transparency report” since...

Facebook published a report on user data requests by governments of different countries for the first half of 2017. The social network has done such reporting within its project “transparency report” since 2013 in order to make government bodies more transparent.

Over the past year the number of requests has increased by 30%, and by 23% in the last six months.

Of all the countries in the world requesting information about users most requests are from the United States, India, Britain, Germany, and France. For each of these countries, more than half of the requests were met.

Despite the disclosure of statistics of requests, Facebook can not say which information the governments were interested in. However, it can be assumed that the number of official appeals from government agencies are increasing due to the threat of terrorism. It may also be influenced by a political agenda.

In addition to government requests, Facebook also counts claims related to intellectual property. In 2017, more than 200,000 requests for copyright were received. 68% of requests were met by administrators of the social network which affected 1.8 million pieces of content. Also, 685,000 Facebook entries were deleted from Instagram after 70,000 copyright requests.

More than 110,000 pieces of content, of which over 37,000 were on Instagram, Facebook deleted due to trademark infringement. 217,265 entries were also removed due to claims related to counterfeiting.

According to the report we can conclude that even though there is such a large amount of content on Facebook, Instagram is also gradually acquiring a role of an important and influential media resource.