| credits: Chukky Nwakky
The
Federal Government has not made any request for access to private data
of Nigerian users of Facebook, a report by the social networking site
has revealed.
There has been apprehension in some
quarters that the FG may resort to seeking information from major social
networking sites after the lid was blown open on an alleged $40m
Internet surveillance contract it entered into with an Israeli firm.
The contract was allegedly awarded
earlier in the year to the firm, Elbit Systems, to spy on citizens’
computers and Internet communications under the guise of intelligence
gathering and national security–including discussions on social media,
like Facebook and Twitter.
An outrage followed the discovery as
many Nigerians viewed the action as an assault on their civil rights.
The report by the social networking site titled,“Global Government
Request Report,” however, shows the list of countries whose government
requested for private data of their citizens on Facebook in the last
six months as excluding Nigeria.
The report is the first from Facebook
and it is not unconnected to a revelation from a former technical
contractor and Central Intelligence Agency employee, Edward Snowden, who
had raised the alarm that the United States government, under a
programme codenamed PRISM, is monitoring Internet traffic through
Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Yahoo and other websites.
Users of the social networking site
across the globe besieged the Facebook page of Mark Zuckerberg, the
Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, upon this statement from the former
CIA employee and urged him not to disclose details of their online
activities to their home governments.
Facebook stated that the Federal
Government or any of its agencies had not requested for citizens’
account information in any official capacity relating to criminal cases,
such as robberies or kidnappings in the period under review.
It listed Egypt, South Africa, Uganda
and neighbouring West African country, Côte d’Ivoire, as the African
nations that sought basic subscriber information, such as name and
length of being on the social network, IP address logs related to
location and actual account content of their citizens’ activities on
Facebook.
The report also highlighted the number
of requests from each country and the percentage of data that Facebook
was required to disclose by law.The social networking site noted that
only 74 countries in the world requested for information on about 38,000
Facebook users.
Facebook stated in the report that it
got data requests for 25 users from the four African nations but added
that no data were produced for any of the requests made.
Egypt made the lion share of the requests from Africa as it demanded data on 11 users from the country.
Facebook General Counsel, Colin Stretch,
stated in a blog post that the social network has strict guidelines in
place to deal with all government data requests, adding that many of
the requests which do not meet “a very high legal bar’’ are refused.
Stretch said, “As we have made clear in
recent weeks, we have stringent processes in place to handle all
government data requests. We believe this process protects the data of
the people who use our service, and requires governments to meet a very
high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any
information about any of our users.
“We scrutinise each request for legal
sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and
require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each
request. We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find
legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague
requests. When we are required to comply with a particular request, we
frequently share only basic user information, such as name.’’
A cursory look at the report shows that
about half of the requests Facebook received came from the American
government. The technology company said it complied with 79 per cent of
the estimated 21, 000 requests it received from US agencies.
India was second on the list of
countries with the highest requests of private Facebook data with 4, 144
requests. Facebook said some data were produced only in 50 per cent of
the requests from the Indian government.
The United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and
France were also on the list of countries which made the highest
requests for information on their citizens who make use of the social
networking site whose users recently surpassed the one billion mark.
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