Twitter To Feds: Your User-Data Requests Need Way More Sunlight

Twitter is not content with the transparency agreement tech companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft have reached with the U.S. government.

The new agreement requires companies to report the number of national security requests they’ve received in bands of 250 or 1,000—including, but not discerning between, FISA requests and national security letters. Twitter thinks this “a step in the right direction,” but not good enough for the public.

The company said in a Thursday blog post it is considering legal options to release more detailed information about the government’s requests for user data to provide “sufficient transparency for the public.”

“We think the government’s restriction on our speech not only unfairly impacts our users’ privacy, but also violates our First Amendment right to free expression and open discussion of government affairs,” Jeremy Kessel, global legal policy manager at Twitter wrote in a company blog post.

Twitter saw a 66% increase in requests for account information since publishing its first transparency report in 2012. The majority of the government requests for user account information come from the U.S., but the report excludes U.S. national security requests.

Twitter admitted the new agreement between tech companies and the Justice Department is a positive step, but without being able to specify the numbers associated with each kind of national security request, the current agreement settles on a range that lacks “sufficient precision to be meaningful” to Twitter’s users.

“We also want the freedom to disclose that we do not receive certain types of requests, if, in fact, we have not received any,” Kessel wrote. “Unfortunately, we are currently prohibited from providing this level of transparency.”

Lead image by eldh on Flickr