Facebook released its second Government Requests Report which covers the second half of 2013. The report is sort of an upgraded version of the previous report covering the period between January and June 2013. It includes two new factors- the statistics for content removal requests and Facebook-owned photo-sharing app, Instagram’s data.
The report details for the US -
The report details for India -
The report details for the UK -
To check the number of requests made by the government of other countries click here.
Facebook isn’t happy with government probes
However, the social media giant believes these government requests are against its polices of making the world an open platform where people can share what interests them. “Sometimes, the laws of a country interfere with that mission, by limiting what can be shared there”, Colin Stretch, Facebook General Counsel pointed out in the official blog. He also explained, “we only restrict access to content in the requesting country. We do not remove content from our service entirely unless we determine that it violates our community standards.”
Facebook Founder and CEO Marc Zuckerberg was vocal about his resentment at persistent probes by government agencies, “I've been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”
Category