Facebook Denied To Give Data Access To Pakistani Government

It’s not new that Pakistani government has requested data from Facebook, governments requesting data access has been on the rise sharply since 2015 all over the globe. But in the recent development Government of Pakistan has requested some data access which was denied outrightly by Facebook management.

According to Dawn previously, the government made 471 requests to Facebook for data related to 706 accounts/users in late 2016, showing increase in the number of requests made to Facebook during the first six months of 2015.

The details were given in a bi-annual transparency report, “Global Government Requests Report”, which was officially published by Facebook recently.

Between January and June of 2015, 192 such requests were made for data related to 275 users/ accounts, which shows a sharp increase of 145 percent in the number of requests made by the government to Facebook during the second half of the year.

Facebook accepted some of the requests and said: “Based on legal requests from the Pakistan Telecom Authority, Facebook restricted access to six items that were alleged to violate local laws prohibiting blasphemy.”

Governments Requests To Facebook Data Globally

According to Tech Crunch last year’s post, Facebook released its latest transparency report, the report covers government requests for user data in the first half of 2016. Report says that the government requests for user data increased by 27% globally as compared to last half of 2015.

US law enforcement agencies are on the top of list requesting this data. According to the report, the majority of the requests (56 percent) received from US law enforcement contained a non-disclosure clause that prevented Facebook from notifying the user in question, the company noted.

As with prior transparency reports, Facebook also detailed the number of content restriction requests — that is, the requests from governments in response to postings that violate local laws.

These actually decreased by 83 percent from 55,827 to 9,663. However, those figures don’t point to a general decline in these sorts of requests from governments. Instead, the last cycle’s numbers were elevated more than usual due to a sharp increase in requests related to a single image from the terrorist attacks in Paris last November.

via: Dawn, Tech Crunch, Reuters