Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Twitter Releases Data on Government Requests for User Information

Pilkington, Ed. "Twitter Releases Data on Government Requests for User Information." The Guardian, July 2, 2012.

From the article: "Almost 80% of all requests made to Twitter for information on its users to be released in the course of criminal investigations or other probes are made by the US government, the micro-blogging website has revealed in its first transparency report.

Following in
Google's wake, Twitter has released for the first time data on government requests for user information. The table shows that the US government is significantly more interventionist in terms of the number of times it has asked Twitter to hand over information than any other government in the world.

From 1 January 2012, the US made 679 user information requests out of a total of 849, compared with 98 requests from the Japanese government, 11 each from the Canadian and British governments and under 10 for a slew of other countries." Read more

See also
Williams, Matt. "Twitter Forced to Release Occupy Protester's Tweets to New York Court." The Guardian, July 2, 2012.