According to a report released by Facebook, the company handed over Irish users’ account info on 34 occasions during the first six months of 2013.
Are you paranoid that all your account info stored on Facebook has been given away by the people you trusted it with? Well, we wouldn’t worry too much, unless of course you happen to be involved in some sort of shady activity.
The Irish Independent reports that Facebook handed over the account info of Irish people suspected to be involved in criminal activity including: child endangerment, sex crimes, assault, homicide, gang-related activity, stalking and credit-card fraud.
The information released by the company included the users’ name, length of time as a Facebook user, IP addresses and, on occasions, actual account content.
Irish authorities actually requested the account info of 40 Irish users over the first six months of this year, but were only successful in obtaining 34. So why is Facebook actively telling us about releasing users’ info, what with all this talk about online security and that Edward Snowden fella? Well, it’s all part of Facebook’s new stance on global government requests.
“We scrutinise each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each request,” Facebook said.
“We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad and vague requests.”
