Amazon has always been notorious for its secretive data policies, with transparency reports that are just a few pages long. However, today’s report is by far one of the lightest reads to emerge for the company, even though it received 800% more requests from governments in the 2nd half of 2020 as compared to the first half.
Amazon claims that it got a total of 27,664 government demands for user data from government authorities around the world in 2nd half of 2020. To put this number in perspective, the first half of 2020 saw just 3,222 data demands, which means that the company received 800% more requests in the last 6 months of the year. Moreover, this number only includes data requests made for information collected from its Echo, Fire, and Ring devices.
AWS, which Amazon operates as a separate entity, received just 523 requests.
The company has also highlighted which countries made the most requests. Out of the total 27,664, Germany made the most requests, standing at a whopping 42.4% of the pie. Spain (18.8%), Italy(11.2%), United States(11.1%), United Kingdom(4.3%) and France(3.1%) and others(9.1%) made up for the rest of the requests.
Moreover, the company also said that 52(or 0.2%) of the requests were related to content, while the rest (99.8%) were non content based requests.
AWS, on the other hand, received just 523 requests for data, 75% of them coming from the United States alone. Out of this, 15 (or 3%) of the total requests were for content based data, while the rest were for data not related to content.
Amazon’s transparency report does not give readers a lot of information about how it handles data. Instead, most of the report just talks about how the company responds to legal requests. The only thing that the company said on the issue was this:
“Amazon does not disclose customer information in response to government demands unless required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding offer. Amazon objects to overboard or otherwise inappropriate requests as a matter of course.”
