In its latest report on global government requests, Facebook revealed a 27 percent rise in requests for user account data in the first half of 2016.
Overall, Facebook received 59,229 requests during the first six months of the year, compared to 46,710 requests in the latter half of 2015.
By far the largest amount of data requests (23,854) were from law enforcement agencies in the United States. The company complied with 80.65 percent of the data requests in the U.S. The majority of these requests (approximately 56 percent) contained a nondisclosure order that prevented Facebook from notifying the user that their data was being handed over.
Facebook claims it applies “a rigorous approach” to every government request it receives in order to “protect the information” of the people that use its service. “We scrutinize each request for legal sufficiency, no matter which country is making the request, and challenge those that are deficient or overly broad,” writes Facebook in its blog post. “We do not provide governments with “back doors” or direct access to people’s information.”
This year alone, Facebook has drawn the criticism of lawmakers and officials from Israel, Germany, and the United Kingdom. over its content reporting process. Its detractors claim it is obstructing “terror investigations” and failing to curb the recruitment activity of extremist groups on its platform. In its response to Digital Trends in August, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We treat take-down requests by law enforcement with the highest urgency.”
Facebook is also reporting that its content restriction requests (items blocked or taken down for violating local law) dropped 83 percent compared to the last half of 2015 — from 55,827 to 9,663. The last cycle’s figures were unusually high due to French content restrictions of a single image from the November 13 Paris attacks.
For the first time, Facebook is also including information about the requests it receives from global governments to preserve data pending receipt of formal legal process. In general, a preservation request from a law enforcement agency sees Facebook preserve a temporary snapshot of the data in question. During the first half of 2016 Facebook received 38,675 preservation requests for 67,129 accounts.
Additionally, law enforcement made 3,016 emergency requests (relating to matters that involve imminent risk or threat) for 4,192 accounts. Due to reforms this year by the USA Freedom Act, Facebook is also offering information about National Security Letters (NSLs).
Facebook has shared an NSL it received from the Jacksonville, Florida, FBI office, as well as the government’s authorization letter permitting the company to disclose the information at its own discretion. As a result, it updated the range of NSLs from the second half of 2015 from 0-499 to 1-499. The NSL is available here, and you can view the entire Global Government Requests Report here.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?