PH requests for access to FB accounts, data down in 2018

The Philippine government has requested Facebook to give it access to 31 sets of data and 42 accounts of Filipino users for the first six months of 2018.

In a bi-annual report released by Facebook, 48 percent of the requests were granted by the social media company.

Facebook did not specify, however, the kind of data and the identity of the internet users that the government had requested.

According to the data by Facebook, this is lower than the previous request during the last six months of 2017.

From July to December 2017, Facebook data showed that the Philippine government request to have access to 36 sets of data and 50 accounts of Filipinos.

Forty-four percent of these requests were approved to be produced by Facebook.

In the current year, Facebook data showed that 22 requests were made for “legal” purposes while nine requests were made for “emergency” purposes.

“Facebook responds to government requests for data in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service,” the company said. “Each and every request we receive is carefully reviewed for legal sufficiency and we may reject or require greater specificity on requests that appear overly broad or vague.”

Overall, Facebook has recorded a total of 103,815 requests around the globe for the first half of 2018.

Out of the 127 countries, the United States was recorded to have the highest number of requested data at 42,466.

It was followed by India with 16,580 requests.

The social media giant also noted that the requests sent by different companies were mostly for emergency purposes, with 79.8 percent while the legal process use tallied 73.2 percent. /atm