Facebook said Wednesday that government requests for user account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016, compared to the second half of last year, with U.S. law enforcement agencies topping the list. From a report on TechCrunch: According to the report, government requests for account data increased by 27 percent globally as compared with the last half of 2015. The number of requests grew from 46,710 to 59,229, Facebook said. The majority of the requests (56 percent) received from U.S. law enforcement contained a non-disclosure clause that prevented Facebook from notifying the user in question, the company noted. As with prior transparency reports, Facebook also detailed the number of content restriction requests — that is, the requests from governments in response to postings that violate local laws. These actually decreased by 83 percent from 55,827 to 9,663. However, those figures don’t point to a general decline in these sorts of requests from governments. Instead, the last cycle’s numbers were elevated more than usual due to a sharp increase in requests related to a single image from the terrorist attacks in Paris last November.

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Source: Slashdot – Government Requests For Facebook User Data Up 27 Percent in First Half of 2016