BD urges Facebook to provide info about 17 accounts

Staff Reporter :
The Bangladesh government has formally asked the authorities of Facebook, a globally popular social connecting network, from January to June this year, to provide information about 17 local users.
The information was sought from January to June this year. But the FB Inc did not response to the requests. This was revealed by the FB in its official account recently.
FB in its report [about government requests] said: We respond to valid requests relating to criminal cases. Each and every request we receive is checked for legal sufficiency and we reject or require greater specificity on requests that are overly broad or vague.
It said requests by governments for user information rose by about a quarter in the first half of 2014 over the second half of last year. In the first six months of 2014, governments around the world made 34,946 requests for data. During the same time, the amount of content restricted because of local laws increased about 19 percent. “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,” the company said in a company blog post yesterday. In the same report FB also provided the statistics of the governments’ [of different countries] requests and their responds. “India made 4,559 requests seeking data on 5,958 users, in which case the company responded to 50.87% of the requests made by the Indian government,” the report said.
It said, “We restricted access in India to a number of pieces of content reported primarily by law enforcement officials and the India Computer Emergency Response Team under local laws prohibiting criticism of a religion or the state.”
Upon requests, 4,960 pieces of content were restricted, the report shows. United States made 15,433 Law Enforcement Requests for Data of 23,667 Users/Accounts, 80.15% of which were duly responded.
FB responded to 71.68% of 2110 requests of UK for 2619 accounts.