U.S. appetite for Internet user data not unique
From: ComputerWorld (Australia)
Jaikumar Vijayan
For all the privacy concerns raised by Edward Snowden’s leaks about government data collection activities, the U.S. is not alone or even always the most demanding when it comes to law enforcement requests for customer data from Internet service providers.
A whitepaper released by Washington-based law firm Hogan Lovells this week shows that law enforcement agencies in several other countries in Europe and elsewhere have equally, if not even more, voracious appetites for such data.
The conclusions in the whitepaper are based on a review of all the transparency reports released by Google, Microsoft, Twitter, LinkedIn and Skype that detail all requests for customer data made by law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In the U.S, at least, requests for the data are typically made in connection with ongoing criminal and other investigations by law enforcement.
Transparency reports do not document national security-related requests for data by the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Google has been releasing the data for the past three years, Twitter and LinkedIn have done so for the past 18 months while Skype and Microsoft have been at it for one year.
Christopher Wolf, author of the whitepaper and director of the privacy and information management practice at Hogan Lovells, said the data shows that, when adjusted for population size and numbers of Internet users, U.S. demands for customer data are not all that extraordinary.
In fact, in 2012, the rate at which European governments sought access to personal data from major service providers increased faster than the rate of U.S. government requests, Wolf noted.
“Many in Europe right now are under the impression that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have a greater appetite for data and access more data than anyone else in the world,” Wolf said. But with respect to law enforcement requests at least, the U.S. is at or below the levels in many other countries, he said.
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