Pakistan’s Requests for Facebook Data Rise Sharply

As governments all over the world try to gain access to private user data over national security matters, Facebook regularly releases such information for public interest as well. It details how many requests it got from governments and how many of them were entertained or rejected. The latest set of statistics for user data requests and content restriction were revealed a few days ago.

Overall, data requests for private user data continued to grow in the second half of 2016. As compared to the former half of 2016, a 9 percent increase in data requests was reported generally.

Pakistan’s Requests for User Data Rise

Pakistani government’s attempts at data retrieval grew rapidly in the second half of last year, witnessing a rise of over 40 percent.

During the time period, a total of 1,002 requests were made against 1,431 user accounts. Facebook responded positively to 67 percent of the requests, revealing details regarding the respective users. For the same period, Facebook reported 442 cases of account preservation requests.

The social network restricted 6 fan pages for violating Pakistan’s laws. The amount is considerably less than the number of pages blocked in the first half of 2016.

Facebook had blocked 25 pages in the first half. Despite government’s attempts to get several controversial fan pages banned, only a handful of requests were accepted.

PTA and FIA have been in contact with Facebook, requesting to ban or at least restrict certain pages for Pakistani users following the court’s decision to ban the social network if it does not comply with local laws.

Facebook has also stated the number of disruptions faced by Pakistani users in the last six months of 2016. It is the first time that this information has been shared for Pakistani users.

Read More: Facebook Vice President to Visit Pakistan Next Month

According to the report, only one disruption was faced during the six months and it occurred in November 2016, over security concerns in some regions of the country.

Globally, data requests increased to 64,279, up from 59,229. Since users aren’t notified of the data requests, such bi-annual reports are released by the social network to identify the balance of government requests for data and a user’s privacy.

He is the Chief Content Officer at ProPakistani. Reach out at aadil.s[at]propakistani.pk



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