Digital Privacy

Twitter recently released their first transparency report, outlining how often in the first half of 2012 government or copyright holders requested Twitter account information and how often this information was produced. The majority of information requests (679) came from the United States but also a significant number came from Japan (98). US requests were followed in 75% of the cases while in Japans case only 20% of the requests were fulfilled. Interestingly, only 3 requests to remove a Twitter account by court orders were received (Greece and Turkey) but none of them was followed!

In total, Twitter received in the first half of 2012 as many requests as in all of 2011, which is a much bigger increase than overall Twitter growth (which was at about 20% in the US).

All in all, these numbers do not surprise me that much, taking all of the 140 million active users into account. And it is reassuring that Twitter does not seem eager to give out user data (Twitter already took a stand for an Occupy Wall Street protester at the beginning of this year).

Twitters transparency report is a perfect example on how to build users trust: by making the companies actions transparent. They should be a glowing example for other web companies who basically store all the information of our lives online.

If you are interested in what Facebook sends if they get a subpoena for a user, you can see an example online (it’s 62 pages of Facebook data …).