Yahoo has now joined the transparency party, disclosing for the first time on Friday the number of requests (PDF) for user data that it received from law enforcement and other government agencies worldwide. Facebook shared its figures for the first time late last month, following other companies like Twitter, Google, and Microsoft.
As Kashmir Hill, a reporter for Forbes, observantly pointed out: “Telecoms are black hole[s] still.”
Not surprisingly, the United States leads Yahoo's list by far. The company reported that during the first half of 2013, American authorities made 12,444 requests of 40,322 accounts. Yahoo handed over content in 37 percent of cases, whereas in 55 percent of the cases, the company handed over only “non-content data” (NCD), which includes:
basic subscriber information including the information captured at the time of registration such as an alternate e-mail address, name, location, and IP address, login details, billing information, and other transactional information (e.g., “to,” “from,” and “date” fields from e-mail headers).
By contrast, the next highest requests came from Germany, which made 4,295 requests of 5,306 accounts. The smallest nation that Yahoo provided data for was New Zealand, which made nine requests on nine accounts, and in five of those accounts, Yahoo shared content. The search company also said that it would break out requests for Tumblr data separately in the future.
Notably, Yahoo says its numbers "include all types of government data requests such as criminal law enforcement requests and those under US national security authorities, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and National Security Letters (NSLs), if any were received."
“Our legal department demands that government data requests be made through lawful means and for lawful purposes,” Ron Bell, Yahoo’s general counsel, wrote on Friday. “We regularly push back against improper requests for user data, including fighting requests that are unclear, improper, over-broad, 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 US Government to consider further declassifying court documents from that case.”
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