Facebook Released 19,000 Users Data To Spy Requests From The American Government

A couple of days ago we told you that Facebook, Microsoft and Google were demanding permission to reveal spy requests. Today Facebook claimed a minor victory in being able to partially reveal some information about American government data requests. In the last 6 months of 2012 the U.S government made some 9000 to 10000 requests to get information for around 18000-19000 users.

Facebook had previously denied any involvement in PRISM as they were bound by law not to say anything but now they have been granted permission they were able to disclose these details. However, this data isn’t that useful to us as it is aggregated heavily. This means it is difficult to dinstinguish between the type of requests and at what level of government they occurred. Obviously a lot of people are more interested in Federal enquiries of a more “spy-like” nature.

Facebook is still currently pursuing permission to release data on how many secret requests that had to respond to. Apparently Facebook only complied with around 79% of government requests. In the grand scheme of things this data collection on 19,000 people out of Facebook’s 1.1 billion users is pretty insignificant, although in my opinion it is still 19,000 people too many given that none of the individuals were contacted for permission to have their data investigated.

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s data requests?

Image courtesy of Facebook