After years of remaining mum on the number of government data requests it receives, Amazon is now breaking its silence with its first transparency report about how it responds to courts and law enforcement agencies asking for information about its customers.
During the six-month period between January and May this year, Amazon says [pdf] it received a total of 813 subpoenas and provided all the information requested in 542 of them. One hundred and forty-five subpoenas did not receive any response from the e-commerce firm.
Amazon says it also received 25 search warrants and fully responded to 13 of them, while court orders numbered 13, to which Amazon provided full information to only four of them. National security requests numbered between zero and 249, but Amazon does not state how many of these it complied with.
As for requests from foreign governments, Amazon received 132 of them and provided full information for 108. Seventeen non-U.S. requests did not receive any information, while the remaining seven only received partial information. Amazon also received one request to remove data, to which it fully complied.
In contrast, Facebook's latest transparency report released in March shows the social network receiving more than 35,000 data requests from both the U.S. and foreign governments during the second half of 2014.
This is not surprising, since Facebook thrives on collecting user information and is one of the major sources of information that governments turn to. Amazon, meanwhile, is more than just an e-commerce company. Its Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud computing platform upon which enterprises build their apps and online businesses.
"Amazon knows customers care deeply about privacy and data security, and we optimize our work to get these issues right for customers," says AWS chief information security officer Stephen Schmidt.
Schmidt also says Amazon notifies customers about data requests affecting them, unless the order expressly prohibits them from doing so. He also says that Amazon "never participated in the NSA's PRISM program" and opposes legislation that proposes to undermine the encryption of Internet products and services.
Amazon promises to publish transparency reports bi-annually after refusing to do so in the last few years. However, pressure from advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union has pushed Amazon to follow in the footsteps of other technology companies to disclose information about how it responds to data requests from the government.
The trend of releasing transparency reports began in response to backlash from foreign governments, once major customers of American technology firms, after Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government is actively targeting customer data stored by technology companies.
Photo: Mike Seyfang | Flickr
