Yahoo on Friday released its first ever government transparency report, revealing the number of requests the company has been getting from the US agencies during the period of Jan 1 to June 30 this year.
The trend of companies based out of US, publishing their transparency reports have been on the rise off late, ever since the NSA fiasco happened. While companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter issued such reports, Yahoo has also come out to reveal these statistics.
While the statistics for their newly acquired Tumblr is yet to be out, the company says that they got 12,444 requests from the US government agencies, which included over 40,322 Yahoo user accounts.
These requests included services like Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail and Flickr. Talking about how serious the company is about privacy, the blogpost says:
“At Yahoo, we take user privacy seriously and appreciate our role as a global company in promoting freedom of expression wherever we do business,”
The number of requests that Yahoo received from the US agencies are far less than the number of requests Facebook received in the last few months. Yahoo also revealed that this affected less than 1% of their total user base across the world.
Ron Bill, the company's general counsel, shares his view about the company's policy to reveal user information.
We regularly push back against improper requests for user data, including fighting requests that are unclear, improper, overbroad or unlawful,
In addition, we mounted a two-year legal challenge to the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and recently won a motion requiring the U.S. government to consider further declassifying court documents from that case.
This is not all. Yahoo has also revealed that they would publish the transparency report every six months and they would continue to evaluate the ways to enhance this process.