U.S. government requests for Google user data up 510% since 2010, report says

The U.S. government continues to request more and more user data from the world’s largest tech companies.

According to a new report by end-to-end encryption email company ProtonMail, user data requests from the U.S. government to Google have increased a whopping 510 percent since 2010. And its requests for Facebook data are also growing, with an increase of 364 percent since 2013.

The United States is part of a global intelligence alliance known as the “Fourteen Eyes,” a coalition of 14 countries which agrees to share intelligence information with each other. These countries include the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Italy, and Sweden.

When compared to other countries in the “Fourteen Eyes” surveillance community, the study found that the U.S. leads the charge in government requests for data from companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter. In 2019 alone, the United States made more than 163,000 data requests from these major tech companies.

Of the 14 countries in this alliance, the number of government requests made by the U.S. is more than all of the other member countries combined. For comparison, Germany, the country with the second-highest number of requests, asked for that data a total of 38,000 times.

This number doesn’t even include government requests from Twitter and Yahoo, as ProtonMail points out in its study, considering the two companies have yet to release their final 2019 transparency reports. So that final tally of U.S. requests could be even higher.

As concern and criticism have grown over online privacy and data collection, many of the big tech companies have started to publish these transparency reports, which lay out information regarding these governmental requests. For this particular study, ProtonMail analyzed reports provided by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Yahoo.

“It’s no secret that companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have gathered vast amounts of personal data which users have provided unsuspectingly,” said ProtonMail founder and CEO Andy Yen in a statement. “As a result, big tech companies now retain more personal data than the most sophisticated government mass surveillance programs, and it is clear that governments do routinely ask for, and gain access to this data. Users may have consented that Google and Facebook can use their data for advertising, but many will be unaware that their personal data is also available to governments.”

The growing rate at which the United States has requested private user data from these big tech corporations is definitely worrisome. Users should be aware of what information they freely hand over to companies like Google and Facebook, and consider the possibility that this information may end up in the government's hands.