In Europe, Thousands of Requests for Facebook Data

Online surveillance by the United States was the main subject of a hearing on Monday evening organized by the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee. But one of the more noteworthy parts of the session was a presentation by a senior Facebook employee who described demands by European Union governments.

Richard Allan, the director for public policy for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said Facebook received 8,500 requests from the European Union affecting 10,000 user accounts during the first six months of this year.

In the United States, by comparison, local, state and federal authorities issued Facebook with up to 12,000 requests involving as many as 21,000 Facebook accounts, according to information provided by Linda Griffin, a London-based spokesman for the company. Those figures were up from 10,000 requests affecting up to 19,000 accounts during the second half of 2012, Mr. Allan said.

European Union countries making the most direct applications to Facebook during the first half of the year were Britain (1,975), Germany (1,886), Italy (1,705) and France (1,547). Law enforcement bodies in Europe can make direct requests to Facebook.

The figures for Europe understate the volume of requests because of the existence of so-called Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties between European countries and the United States. Requests made through those treaties look similar to any other request by American authorities, so Facebook is unable to tell how many of those requests came from European Union governments, according to Ms. Griffin.

Reports this year about the scope of American online spying programs have become a worldwide topic of debate. But slowly, the spying done by Europeans is also getting more attention. On Monday evening, Mr. Allan called on governments everywhere to allow more transparency and flexibility around the national security-related orders his company must comply with.

Richard Allan, the director for public policy for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Pool photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth

Richard Allan, the director for public policy for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“What’s interesting, and what’s missing from the puzzle at the moment,” Mr. Allan said at the hearing, is “how little information governments publish on their own requests.”

For “any citizen to have a complete picture and know who’s telling the truth,” the authorities making the requests also need “to say how many requests they’ve made in our name,” he said.

Facebook doesn’t charge governments for access to customer accounts. But Mr. Allan said the company still was exploring the idea of charging to see “whether or not it’s worth having the friction of money in there as some way of rationing the data requests that governments make.”

In any case, only “a tiny fraction of 1 percent of Facebook user accounts were subject to any kind of government request in the past year,” said Mr. Allan, who said that the company has 1.2 billion active users worldwide.

Facebook also was responding to requests when there was “an imminent risk of death or bodily harm,” such as in the case of abductions of children, and not only when national security was at stake, said Mr. Allan.

The hearings at the European Parliament on electronic surveillance of citizens are set to continue Thursday, when the focus will be on the security of European Union institutions and the oversight of European intelligence agencies by national parliaments.