Research Shows There is an Increase in Requests for User Data from US Government
According to the data by Surfshark, the US government requests to have user data from many big tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta. The data requested by the US Government and law enforcement agencies is almost double the data requested by the EU. There was a 38% increase in data requests in 2022, with about eight times increase between 2013 and 2022. The data requests went from 1.6 million to 2.2 million in 2022.
The researchers of the study say that there were 140 governments requesting for user data in 2021, which increased to 147 in 2022. In total, data from 9 million accounts was requested from 190 countries during this period. The user data is investigated for a number of purposes, from criminal investigations to administrative or civil cases.
Among all the countries requesting for data, most of the requests are from the USA and EU. The USA had about 3.3 million data requests from 2013 to 2022. USA and EU make up 58% of all the data which was requested from different countries. Germany and Singapore have second and third most requested user data. Germany requested for 850 accounts per 100,000 people with Singapore requesting for 696 accounts. The UK was the fourth country requesting for most accounts (672) and France (616) being the fifth country to request most user data.
Other countries which saw an increase in requested accounts were Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India, Bangladesh, Poland and Greece. Apple had the most account requests with a 479% increase in 2022. On the other hand, many authorities had more interests in Meta accounts between 2013 and 2022. 8.9 million accounts were requested by Meta during this period while Apple just had 853,700 accounts requested.
Many tech firms are complying with these user data requests, with disclosing data for 269,000 requests in the last 10 years. Surfshark says that these requests are going to keep on increasing in upcoming years. All in all, the disclosure rate for accounts is 72%, with Apple disclosing the most information. It disclosed 83% accounts upon government requests. The rate of disclosure is slightly lower in other companies like Google (72.9%), Meta (72.8%) and Microsoft (67%).
