Twitter Complies With 63% Of Government User Info Requests

Sites include Twitter.com . Published on July 19th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Twitter like most social networking platforms is a rich source of data for those who rely on that sort of thing to carry out their work. It comes as no real surprise therefore that Twitter is tapped regularly by governments who seek information on people and organization—think WikiLeaks.

A recent report, dubbed “Transparency” by Twitter showed the extent of this cooperation between Twitter and the government. According to the report, Twitter complies with a data request by governments around 63% of the time. In the US, that number is even higher and Twitter claims to have complied to the government 75% of the time when information relating to user accounts is requested.

It looks like governments are also stepping up their campaign to censor users and in five countries specifically, Twitter was told to censor the tweets of particular users. According to Jeremy Kessel, “We’ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012 than in the entirety of 2011. “Moving forward, we’ll be publishing an updated version of this information twice a year.”

I suppose this latest report shows that user privacy is dead (if it was ever alive). Right now users can protect themselves with somewhat of a veil of anonymity but gradually, that veil is being removed.

Are you concerned that Twitter arbitrarily hands over your persona; data to the government? Let us know using the comments below.