Please make sure you have read the note on transparency reporting indicators before using this indicator.
The company should clearly disclose its process for responding to governments demands for user information.
Elements:
- Does the company clearly disclose its process for responding to non-judicial government demands?
- Does the company clearly disclose its process for responding to court orders?
- Does the company clearly disclose its process for responding to government demands from foreign jurisdictions?
- Do the company’s explanations clearly disclose the legal basis under which it may comply with government demands?
- Does the company clearly disclose that it carries out due diligence on government demands before deciding how to respond?
- Does the company commit to push back on inappropriate or overbroad government demands?
- Does the company provide clear guidance or examples of implementation of its process for government demands?
Definitions:
Clearly disclose(s) — The company presents or explains its policies or practices in its public-facing materials in a way that is easy for users to find and understand.
Court orders – Orders issued by a court. They include court orders in criminal and civil cases. In the U.S., some legal processes (e.g., subpoena, search warrant, wiretap orders) are court orders.
Government demands — This includes demands from government ministries or agencies, law enforcement, and court orders in criminal and civil cases.
Non-judicial government demands — These are requests that come from government entities that are not judicial bodies, judges, or courts. They can include requests from government ministries, agencies, police departments, police officers (acting in official capacity), and other non-judicial government offices, authorities, or entities.
User information — Any data that is connected to an identifiable person, or may be connected to such a person by combining datasets or utilizing data-mining techniques. User information may be either collected or inferred. As further explanation, user information is any data that documents a user’s characteristics and/or activities. This information may or may not be tied to a specific user account. This information includes, but is not limited to, personal correspondence, user-generated content, account preferences and settings, log and access data, data about a user’s activities or preferences collected from third parties either through behavioral tracking or purchasing of data, and all forms of metadata. User information is never considered anonymous except when included solely as a basis to generate global measures (e.g. number of active monthly users). For example, the statement, ‘Our service has 1 million monthly active users,’ contains anonymous data, since it does not give enough information to know who those 1 million users are.
Indicator guidance: Companies increasingly receive government demands to turn over user information. These demands can come from government agencies or courts (both domestic and foreign). We expect companies to publicly disclose their process for responding to demands from governments, along with the basis for complying with these requests. Companies should also publicly commit to pushing back on inappropriate or overbroad government demands.
In some cases, the law might prevent a company from disclosing information referenced in this indicator’s elements. Researchers will document situations where this is the case, but a company will still lose points if it fails to meet standards for all elements. This represents a situation where the law causes companies to fall short of best practice, and we encourage companies to advocate for laws that enable them to fully respect users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy.
Potential sources:
- Company transparency report
- Company law enforcement guidelines
- Company privacy policy
- Company sustainability report
- Company blog posts
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