5 Nov 2014

Governments seek more Facebook data

8:56 pm on 5 November 2014

Requests by governments for Facebook's user data are up by nearly a quarter in the first half of this year compared with the previous six months, the social media giant says.

Global government requests were up by 24 percent to almost 35,000 in the first six months, the social media giant said.

The amount of Facebook content restricted because of local laws also rose about 19 percent in the same period, the BBC reports.

News of the increase comes as Facebook fights its largest ever American court order to hand over data from 400 people.

Photographs, private messages and other information involving people in a benefit fraud trial were given to a New York court last year but the request was only made public in August.

"We're aggressively pursuing an appeal to a higher court to invalidate these sweeping warrants and to force the government to return the data it has seized," Facebook said in a blog on Tuesday.

The world's largest social network also said they "scrutinise" every government request for legal sufficiency and "push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests".

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