Recently, many tech companies that handle huge amounts of personal data have released “Transparency Reports” detailing how often that data has been passed on to government agencies. Those reports show that the United States has been the most active in demanding data access although other governments have made plenty of requests as well. Yahoo is the latest tech company to publish a Transparency Report. The company claimed that it issued the report because, “At Yahoo, we take user privacy seriously and appreciate our role as a global company in promoting freedom of expression wherever we do business. That's why we're issuing our first global transparency report, which details government data requests from January 1, 2013 through June 30, 2013. We include national security requests within the scope of our aggregate statistics.” Yahoo claimed that the total number of accounts specified in the government data requests during the reporting period comprised less than one one-hundredth of one percent of Yahoo users worldwide. The company plans to publish additional transparency reports every six months. The company also added that “Yahoo has joined no program to volunteer user data to governments. Our legal department demands that government data requests be made through lawful means and for lawful purposes. We regularly push back against improper requests for user data, including fighting requests that are unclear, improper, overbroad or unlawful. In addition, we mounted a two-year legal challenge to the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and recently won a motion requiring the U.S. Government to consider further declassifying court documents from that case.” The company's statement must at least be met with a raised eyebrow as Yahoo is one of nine companies that knowingly participate in the NSA's PRISM data collection program. The others are Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The Washington Post reported that “In exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies such as Yahoo and AOL are obliged to accept a ‘directive' from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to US companies from the NSA.” Provided here are links to the Transparency Reports put out by tech firms popular in the region. Users of online services should know the potential for their privacy to be breached and perhaps reconsider what gets shared in cyberspace. https://www.facebook.com/about/government_requests https://transparency.twitter.com/information-requests/2013/jan-jun http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/ http://info.yahoo.com/transparency-report/ http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-us/reporting/transparency/
