According to new findings by Atlas VPN, government requests for Meta user data are on the rise.

In 2022, Meta received 476,802 user data requests by governments worldwide, with a total of 827,927 user data records requested. This marks a significant growth of 16% compared to 2021, and a whopping 971% rise since 2013.

Meta disclosed at least some data in response to 76.45% of all requests.

Atlas VPN’s numbers are derived from the Meta transparency report, which features the government requests for user data since the year 2013, including both routine legal processes and emergency disclosure requests.

The user data requests include two metrics: the number of requests a company receives from authorities and the number of accounts specified within those requests.

In the first half of 2022, governments worldwide filed 237,414 requests demanding data of 412,285 Meta users.

In the year’s second half, the number of data requests increased to 239,388 while the number of requested accounts rose to 415,642.

Since 2013, Meta received a total of 2,247,594 government requests concerning 3,629,299 user accounts.

By Country

In 2022, Meta received user data requests from government in over 130 countries, but the distribution of the requests varied.

The United States government leads the way in terms of both the number of requests and the volume of user data requested.

In 2022, Meta received data requests from the US government concerning 236,928 platform users, represented a 10% increase compared to the previous year, equating to approximately 70.04 requests per 100,000 people.

What was unclear in the data is if the US only requested data from US users, or if it could and did request data from non-US users.

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Meta was recently fined for not establishing the correct legal basis for transferring EU user data to the US, which is against GDPR. The European regulator was concerned that data shared with the US without proper contractual protections could be easily monitored by US law enforcement agencies, as allowed by US law.

Meta will now have to create a contract with it’s EU users to ensure their data rights are not infringed if their data is transferred to the US.

The EU is currently in the works with the US government to create a Data Protection Framework (DPF), which would ensure certain GDPR rights are protected when EU data is transferred to the US, without the need for specific contracts for each transfer.

Recently, the UK announced a similar initiative to build a UK-US data bridge, to extend the DPF to account for UK data and UK data laws when data is transferred to the US.

Meta complied with about 88.07% of the 133,511 user data requests by the US government.

The UK made 25,233 data requests in 2022, ranking behind India (198,015), Brazil (121,097), Germany (51,783) and France (30,154). To put this in perspective, the UK made 37.38 requests per 100,000 people.