Germany is the European champion when it comes to querying inventory data from large tech companies. Over a ten-year period from 2013, German authorities requested user information on 709,400 accounts from Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft.
Advertisement
According to population size, the Federal Republic ranks second worldwide after the United States and first in Europe (850 requested account information per 100,000 inhabitants). This is 57 percent of all requested accounts in Western Europe.
For comparison: Austria ranks 22nd worldwide with 136 inventory data requests per 100,000 citizens, Switzerland ranks 15th with 245 corresponding requests. German authorities request seven times more information on user accounts per inhabitant than the global average.
These figures come from a report that has now been published Evaluating the transparency reports of four big tech companies by VPN provider Surfshark, covering 190 countries. The requests are often related to criminal investigations. Authorities also need user data in civil or administrative law cases in which they need digital evidence. Between 2013 and 2022, the countries involved worldwide requested information on nearly 9 million accounts from the four platform operators. This number has increased more than eightfold during this decade, with 2022 alone seeing an increase of nearly 38 percent compared to the previous year.
Apple has been particularly willing to provide information since 2016
58 percent of all accounts of interest to authorities during the period investigated were from the US and the EU. The total number of inventory data queried in the United States since 2013 is 3.3 million. This means that the United States also ranks first in per capita assessments, with half of the top ten countries including Germany, France, Ireland, Portugal and Belgium. Singapore, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Brazil remain in terms of the highest number of requests per 100,000 inhabitants.
However, the four tech companies do not always respond to requests for data disclosure, either in full or in part. German authorities received more or less detailed information in 65.4 percent of their requests. Google received the most requests from local authorities, Apple the least. During the analyzed period, companies complied with an average of 72 percent of requests for user data. Apple has been the most disclosive since 2016, with its disclosure rate increasing from 75 in 2016 to 83 percent in 2022. While the iPhone maker has an average of 82 percent, the remaining three companies have slightly lower response rates: Google and Meta come in at 73 percent, Microsoft comes in at 67 percent. Surfshark worries that government access to user communication data could expand significantly with the planned EU regulation on chat controls.
(Never)
