Facebook and Microsoft declined Belarus’ secret service requests for user account data

In 2015, the Belarusian authorities asked Facebook to provide them with account data of one and only user from Belarus, which the social network declined.

Facebook administration published a regular Government Requests Report, which contains information about requests related to various products and services to let people ‘understand the nature and extent of these requests’ and ‘the strict policies and processes’ Facebook has in place to handle them.

Such report lists the country that made the request; the number of requests received from each country; the number of accounts specified in those requests, etc.

In 2015, the Belarusian authorities asked Facebook to provide them with account data of a user from Belarus. Their request was declined, the report says.

“The vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings. <..> We have strict processes in place to handle these government requests. Every request we receive is checked for legal sufficiency. We require officials to provide a detailed description of the legal and factual basis for their request, and we push back when we find legal deficiencies or overly broad or vague demands for information,” the statement says.

As Belsat marks, Facebook also declined four requests made by Russia in 2015. At the same time, 4 of 9 requests by Ukraine were satisfied.