This article originally appeared
on Vulcan Post.
Yesterday, Facebook released a transparency report, revealing the number of
government requests made to the tech giant to release private
information about their users. The report, which has been released
annually by the company since 2013, showed that Singapore
made 198 requests for user information on 213 accounts. Of
these requests, 74.62% were granted.
This places the country 20th in terms of the number of requests
made — a far cry from the United States’ 17,577 requests. However,
Singapore’s number of requests did increase by 11.9%,
following the global trend of increased government requests to the
company by 18%.
These numbers are all well and good, but what do they mean?
The whole purpose of these transparency reports, which were
first released by Google in 2010, is to acknowledge that tech
giants do possess our private information. Facebook.com
has 1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2015,
but they also own other popular social platforms like Instagram and
Whatsapp, which could bring that number even higher. According to
an article by Business Insider, Google+ has 2.2 billion
G+ profiles, and probably has caches of information based on
our search history alone.
Yes, Internet, they store that information, and as we all know in
this day and age, information is power.
It makes sense, then, that governments would approach tech giants
for information, especially with the rise of cyber-crime in the
last few years. The United States made almost 18K requests to
Facebook for private information, but then again, they
lose more than USD 525 million on an annual basis to
cybercrime. In Singapore, cyber-extortion decreased to 50 cases
in the first half of 2015, but Internet love scams have increased
by 53.3%, while credit-for-love scams cheated Singaporeans
of $1.59 million in the same six months. E-commerce scams have
also increased by 65.6% to 1,015 cases.
These figures exclude requests for information
for other criminal cases, such as robberies and
kidnappings.
Image
Credit: http://www.thanhniennews.com
So what kind of information are governments asking for? According
to Facebook, the information usually requested are basic subscriber
information, such as name and length of service. Occasionally, they
may ask for IP address logs or account content.
“We have strict processes in place to handle these government
requests. Every request we receive is checked for legal
sufficiency,” says Facebook on their official transparency report site. “We require
officials to provide a detailed description of the legal and
factual basis for their request, and we push back when we find
legal deficiencies or overly broad or vague demands for
information. We frequently share only basic subscriber
information.”
That means that Facebook makes the final decision on whether to
release that information, based on their own judgement. According
to their Transparency Report, they have denied providing
information before. Panama made one request for information on 38
accounts, and Facebook released 0% of the information.
While the move to release information on government requests is a
step towards true transparency, it is still a single slice of a
bigger pie. The Ranking Digital Rights 2015 Corporate
Accountability Index has revealed that Facebook Inc., amongst other
top tech companies in the world, score low on freedom of expression
and user privacy.
The study, which just launched its inaugural results in Nov 2015,
bases its studies on 13 indicators, which are then grouped into
three main categories — commitment, freedom of expression, and
privacy. Privacy would include indicators like collection, sharing,
and retention of user information, and privacy policies.
So what can we do with this information? Firstly, be aware of the
safety of our private information and practice self-censure when it
comes to online activity. Next, ask questions to the relevant
parties. It may be time to actually read privacy policies for the
social media platforms we have and understand what you’re actually
giving in return for a few minutes of workplace
distraction.
Lastly, know that when push comes to shove, the Singapore
government will be able to dig up information about you online —
with a little help from your favourite social media platform.