Our government loves to snoop. Nick Cohen explained in the Spectator last year why Britain is becoming a surveillance state, and now we have an indication of how much data they have attempted to extract from social networks. Facebook has released its first figures on government requests for data on its users. As the chart below shows, the UK comes third for the amount of data requested, behind the United States and India:
It’s a similar story for Twitter, whose figures from January to June 2013 show that the UK is again third for number of requests, behind the same countries as Facebook:
On the internet telephoning service Skype, the UK government even made more requests last year than any other country. Compared to 1,154 from the US government, the UK made 1,268 requests for data on 2,720 users.
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