Twitter Reports Spike In U.S Government Data Requests For 2013
Ryan Martin / 11 years ago
Twitter has reported a large increase in the number of requests from governments to supply them with private information about its users. According to a company report Twitter saw the number of requests increase by 40% for the first half of 2013 compared to last year.
Interestingly over 75% of these 1,157 data requests took place in the USA and covered issues such as demands for email addresses and IP addresses of certain accounts. You’d think that the 75+% of user requests reflects the usage of Twitter but only 50.99% of Twitter users are American based yet 75% of government requests emanate from the USA.
The report did not include details on FISA and Patriot Act requests since Twitter are yet to received permission to publish such data.
Twitter has a strong tradition of valuing user privacy and refusing to comply with government data requests (unless forced to by legal action or a warrant) and thus it isn’t surprising that the numbers are still comparatively low compared to other social media platforms like Facebook.
Image courtesy of Twitter
