MOSCOW, June 15 (RIA Novosti) – Facebook released figures on Friday that showed for the first time how many requests it had received for user data from the US authorities, amid public outcry over recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance program.
Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, said it had received 9,000-10,000 requests for user data in the second half of last year, adding that the requests concerned 18,000-19,000 accounts and were related to issues ranging from missing children to perceived terrorist threats.
"With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of US state, local, or federal US government request," Facebook lawyer Ted Ullyot wrote in a statement on Friday, adding that Facebook “aggressively” protected its users’ data and frequently rejected requests outright, asked the government to scale down its requests or gave out less data than had been requested.
The company said it was able to reveal the figures after negotiating with national security officials, and added that it was lobbying the government for permission to reveal more detailed statistics “so that our users around the world can understand how infrequently we are asked to provide user data on national security grounds.”
Ullyot wrote that the requests received in the second half of 2012 ranged from “things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat.”
US software giant Microsoft followed suit by announcing that it had received 6,000-7,000 requests regarding 31,000-32,000 accounts in the same period.
The announcements were prompted by public concern about Internet companies sharing user data with US government agencies after former CIA technician Edward Snowden stepped forward earlier this month to leak details of the Prism data collection program, which allegedly monitored phone and electronic correspondence of Americans.
