Bangladesh requested the authorities of Facebook, a popular social network platform globally, to provide information about 12 Bangladeshi users within six months that ended in June last. This was revealed in a global government’s request report of Facebook released on Tuesday.
However, it was not mentioned why the government asked for information about the 12 users and the social media network did not provide any information following the government’s request.
According to the report, government agents in 74 countries demanded information on around 38,000 users in the first six months of current year. Nearly half of the demands originated from the USA government, which made between 11,000 to 12,000 requests on between 20,000 to 21,000 individuals.
Approximately 79 percent of those requests produced some user data. “Transparency and trust are core values at Facebook,” the social network’s legal team stated. “We strive to embody them in all aspects of our services, including our approach to responding to government data requests.
We want to make sure that the people who use our service understand the nature and extent of the requests we receive and the strict policies and processes we have in place to handle them,” the Facebook said. According to the chart, India made the second largest number of requests, pinging Facebook 3,245 times regarding 4,144 users and scoring user data 50 percent of the time.
The UK followed with 1,975 requests on 2,337 individuals, then Germany with 1,886 requests on 2,068 users, Italy with 1,705 requests on 2,306 users and France with 1,547 requests on 1,598 users.
“We have stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests,” the social network said. “We believe this process protects the data of the people who use our service, and requires governments to meet a very high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any information about any of our users,” it said. – UNB
