Government requests to Twitter to reveal private information about users has rocketed by 40 per cent in the first six months of this year, the social media company has revealed as part of its bi-annual transparency report.
The report, intended to highlight trends in government requests for account information, in addition to requests for content removal, details whether Twitter has taken action in regard to the requests.
Further reading Yahoo subjected to 12,000 data requests in six months under Prism Prism and Facebook agree on public data collection transparency after 10K requests in six months Government net snooping rises again
Information government wants about Twitter accounts is usually in the form of email contact details or IP addresses as part of criminal investigations.
The US, which made the most requests for information about Twitter users between January 1 and June 30 this year, made 902 requests for information, representing 78 per cent of the total of 1,157 requests made during the period.
Of those 902 requests, Twitter supplied at least some information about the user in two-thirds of cases.
The US was followed by Japan, which made 87 requests, which resulted in information being released in 16 per cent of cases. The UK made 26 requests for information about Twitter users during the period, but just 15 per cent of those resulted in information being released.
Reasons Twitter gives for not always complying with data requests include government queries failing to identify specific users, overly broad requests and challenges from the user about their information being handed over.
It marks the first Twitter transparency report since the PRISM revelations leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
Snowden's leaked documents suggest that web companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, were handing over large amounts of data about users to the NSA. Twitter acknowledged this alongside the release of its transparency report.
"An important conversation has begun about the extent to which companies should be allowed to publish information regarding national security requests," said Jeremy Kessel, Twitter legal policy manager.
"We have joined forces with industry peers and civil liberty groups to insist that the United States government allows for increased transparency into these secret orders.
"We believe it's important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests - including FISA disclosures - separately from non-secret requests," he added.
Nonetheless, Snowden's latest revelations suggest that regardless of whether social networks are complicit or not, the NSA is collecting nearly everything a user does on the internet on a global basis.
