ANC government asked Facebook to spy for them
Written by Peter Church
Big Tata is watching... Or in this case, trying to watch.
The ANC government of South African has made 14 requests for
information on users of Facebook, the social media site says. In all 14
cases Facebook told the government to take a hike by not releasing any
stats.Facebook took a page out of Google's book by making public requests from governments worldwide by publishing a Global Governments' Request Report for the six months ending June 30. 71 countries made more than 25,600 requests.
According to the report, most requests related to criminal cases, though some cited national security. Facebook says it did report the numbers for all criminal and national security requests to the maximum extent permitted by law. In some cases, governments sought subscriber information like a name and length of service. At times they wanted IP addresses, logs and account content. If they never dished out any info to the Saffa government, we can only assume the requests were for more mundane reasons and not for the reasons of cathcin a criminal and securing national security.
However, the requests by the SA government was miniscule compared to the fact that SA has around 4-million Facebook users.
The US government requested 12,000 reports, India 3,000 and the UK 1,975.
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