Maltese authorities sought information on 97 Facebook user accounts in six months

The Maltese authorities made 89 requests to Facebook on 97 user accounts in the first half of 2013, data issued by Facebook shows. Facebook today released its Global Government Requests Report. It lists which  countries requested information from Facebook about its users, the number of requests received from each of those countries, the number of users/user accounts specified in those requests and the percentage of these requests in which Facebook was required by law to disclose at least some data The report covers the first six months of 2013, ending June 30. With regard to Malta, the data shows that 89 requests were made regarding 97 user accounts. The percentage of requests where some data was produced was 60 per cent. Facebook said it had stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests: "We believe this process protects the data of the people who use our service, and requires governments to meet a very high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any information about any of our users. We scrutinize each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and...