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Singapore made data requests for 117 Singapore-based Facebook
accounts from the start of this year until June, according to a
report released by the social networking site.
In a report published on its website on Wednesday entitled, “Global
Government Requests Report”, on Wednesday, it said Singapore was
among 73 other countries who made similar requests for more data
about user accounts.
In total, the social networking giant said it had received
more than 25,000 requests from governments around the world for the
first six months of the year. US had requested for data on the most
number of users (about 21,000), followed by Italy (2,306) and the
UK (2,337), the report said.
It said authorities from such countries mainly asked for
information to be used in investigations.
In Singapore’s case, it released some user data to 70 per cent of
the requests made.
"We scrutinise each request for legal sufficiency under our terms
and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed
description of the legal and factual basis for each
request.
"We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal
deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague
requests," said Facebook's General Counsel Colin
Stretch.
“The vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such
as robberies or kidnappings. In many of these cases, these
governments,” it said.
Governments usually seek for “basic subscriber information” such as
name, length of service and IP address logs or “actual account
content”, it added.
The social networking site said it issued the report in the
interest of transparency and hoped governments would do the
same.
“Government transparency and public safety are not mutually
exclusive ideals. Each can exist simultaneously in free and open
societies, and they help make us stronger. We strongly encourage
all governments to provide greater transparency about their efforts
aimed at keeping the public safe, and we will continue to be
aggressive advocates for greater disclosure,” it
said.
More details can be found here https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/.
