Government Data Requests

Cluster focuses on tech companies' transparency reports about government and law enforcement requests for user data, including skepticism over high numbers, compliance rates, reporting limitations like national security exclusions, and comparisons across firms like Google, Apple, and Twitter.

➡️ Stable 0.5x Legal
1,194
Comments
18
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#9023
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2009
12
2010
15
2011
32
2012
31
2013
188
2014
61
2015
46
2016
81
2017
70
2018
91
2019
82
2020
64
2021
102
2022
94
2023
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2024
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2025
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2026
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Keywords

DVD apple.com cloudfront.net HN GET i.e vflkjalRT.pdf NSA FISA OP requests request records law enforcement law enforcement report number surveillance data

Sample Comments

what May 8, 2024 View on HN

Bold claim, did you review all 1.5 million requests?

InclinedPlane Jan 7, 2010 View on HN

This is basically a dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971207Note that the other article has a useful calculation indicating that the total number of actual law enforcement requests is in the low hundreds.

InCityDreams Jun 12, 2023 View on HN

How many gdpr requests are you involved in?

mgamache Apr 7, 2013 View on HN

Google complies with 88% of government data requests. Where's the outrage?

madair Jan 7, 2010 View on HN

Title is "8 Million requests for law enforcement data". Hmmm, sounds like data points to me. They were individual pings btw.

s_henry_paulson Jun 19, 2012 View on HN

Wrong statistic. That's takedown requests. This is about requesting user's private data.

bobwaycott Jun 15, 2013 View on HN

Those numbers seem odd. So almost 2 persons are the subject of every request?

tyingq Sep 29, 2022 View on HN

"about 1 in 5 requests" maybe makes it a little willy-nilly. It's not yet clear what's happening.

ethnt Sep 24, 2013 View on HN

Did you even read the page?> This report doesn't include national security requests. We want to report the exact number of national security requests we receive, if any. Unfortunately, the government allows services to disclose only the aggregate number of all law enforcement and national security requests received (and even then the disclosure must be in large bands). A report in that form decreases transparency, especially for companies that receive zero or very few national securit

bsullivan01 Oct 7, 2013 View on HN

I'm not sure that I would call multiple times a year "very, very rarely".Every service loves to use their total number of members and say that requests are very rare--relative to their number of users.But honestly not sure what they could have done, if FBI comes in with a legal request for a specific user's data, what are your options?