Indian government made most requests for user data after US in H2 2022: Meta

Guy Rosen, Chief Information Security Officer at Meta said in a blog post late on Wednesday night that during the second half of 2022, global government requests for user data increased 0.8% from 237,414 to 239,388.

“The US continues to submit the largest number of requests of that total volume, followed by India, Germany, Brazil, France and the UK,” he said. As per its latest transparency report, Meta said the US submitted 64,148 total requests.

Government requests for user data include both routine legal process and emergency disclosure requests. For both request types, Meta said it reports the number of requests received, the number of users/accounts requested, and the percentage of requests where it produced some data.

Interestingly, in the Indian context, the number of requests in the second half of 2022 is higher than the first half of the year when the government had made 55,497 requests to Meta for user data. The company said that 58,681 were legal process requests and 5,171 were emergency disclosure requests. Meta added that 68.26% of requests were where some data was produced.

Further, as many as 106,856 users/accounts had been requested. This is the highest number since the company started reporting these numbers. For context, as per the company’s website, 6,268 users/accounts were requested between January to June, 2015.

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Then there are preservation requests. Meta said it accepts government requests to preserve account information pending receipt of formal legal process.”When we receive a preservation request, we will preserve a temporary snapshot of the relevant account information but will not disclose any of the preserved records unless and until we receive formal and valid legal process,” the company said on its site.

In India, Meta said that during the second half of 2022, it received 8.17k requests and 13.5k users/accounts requested for preservation.