Yahoo has
issued its first transparency report and, not surprisingly, it shows that the U.S. is the source of more governmental requests than any other country.
The report covers the first half of 2013, a time when Yahoo says it received almost 43,000 requests from 17 different governments.* The U.S. was the top source with 42 percent of all requests.
Yahoo says it received 12,444 total U.S. requests, which affected 40,322 Yahoo accounts. In 37 percent of cases, Yahoo disclosed content in reply to the request — this could be in the form of words in an email or instant message, photos on Flickr, Yahoo Address Book entries and other types of content that are stored or sent through Yahoo’s servers. In about 55 percent of cases, Yahoo only shared non-content data (NCD) such as a user’s name, location or alternate email address.
The transparency report offers similar charts for each country that sent Yahoo data requests in the first half of the year.
These reports are becoming standard operating procedure for major internet companies, with Google being the first (or one of the first) to share such data back in 2010.
Yahoo’s report doesn’t include Tumblr-related data requests, but the company says that Tumblr will soon issue its own transparency report.
* Yahoo says its report includes countries where Yahoo has a legal entity. The report doesn’t include countries that made fewer than nine requests during the reporting period. Yahoo says that includes Yahoo Columbia and Yahoo Hispanic Americas.
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