Every year, Facebook gets thousands of requests for data from governments worldwide, including search warrants, subpoenas, or calls to restrict certain kinds of content. And, according to a new report, those requests are increasing at an alarming rate.
According to QZ.com, in the United States, the requests rose by 26% from the last six months of 2016 to the first six months of 2017, while globally, requests increased by about 21%. Since 2013, when the company first started providing data on government requests, the US number has been steadily rising—it has roughly tripled in a period of four years.
This is alarming many and causing a concern about privacy. Joe Joseph, from the DailySheeple, isn’t sugarcoating the reality of Facebook either. “Duh. This is exactly what Facebook was designed to do,” says Joseph.
“You have to remember that Zuckerberg had “seed money” and that seed money came from CIA front companies that put a lot of resources into this and… basically think about it as like, sowing seeds; if you will. They knew that Facebook was gonna bear fruit. I don’t think they realized just how big it would become. But I can tell you that they get so much information and intel from social media: I don’t think that it would go away even if we wanted it to.”
The government keeps requesting the information, and Facebook continues to comply with the government’s demands. In the first six months of 2013, it granted the government—which includes the police—79% of requests (“some data was produced” in these cases, the company says); in the first six months of 2017, that share rose to 85%.
“We continue to carefully scrutinize each request we receive for account data — whether from an authority in the U.S., Europe, or elsewhere — to make sure it is legally sufficient,” Chris Sonderby, the company’s general counsel, wrote in a post. “If a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back, and will fight in court, if necessary.”
But Joseph thinks Facebook is just trying to pacify the easily manipulated sheeple of society.
“This is pretty troubling when you think about what you put out there, what they collect, and Facebook only being one of the many avenues that they have,” Joseph says. “The United States is collecting your data. Whether you like it or not. They are scooping up everything. And they’re taking it and they’re storing it in their facility at Bluffdale, Utah which has the capacity at this time to store every communication on the face of this earth for the next one hundred years.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Joseph continues. “This is stuff that is unacceptable to me, but I’m sure, to a lot of you. And these companies have really gone too far…they can reconstruct your life and make anyone they want a patsy.”
Featured image is from the author.
