MOSCOW, September 12 (RIA Novosti) - Law enforcement agencies made 268 requests in the first half of 2014 for user information from file hosting service Dropbox, requesting that its users not be notified, the company's lawyer Bart Volkmer said in a post on the company's blog.
"In the current period, January to June 2014, we received 268 requests for user information from law enforcement agencies," Volkmer said in a post on the website Thursday. "Law enforcement agencies frequently ask us to keep requests secret even when they don't have the legal right to do so," Volkmer wrote.
"Over the past year, revelations about government surveillance have shown that we need more transparency into when and how government agencies get access to people's information online," he added.
In its 2014 Transparency Report, covering the period from January to July 2014, the service noted, however, that government agencies rarely asked for information without a warrant, which is in line with Dropbox's policy.
The web service went on to point out that the rate of requests from governments remained steady, which meant that the amount of requests received grew proportionately to Dropbox's user base.
Dropbox also did not receive any government requests for data on Dropbox for Business accounts in 2014.
Dropbox is a file hosting service with a user base of 300 million that offers cloud storage, file synchronization and client software. The service is operated by Dropbox Inc., headquartered in San Francisco.
The service has been releasing information about the number of requests for user information it receives from governments on an annual basis since 2012, with plans to publish transparency reports from now on every six months.
