Social networking giant Facebook has claimed that the Irish Government has asked it for the personal details of 40 users from January to June of this year.
The company said it received 34 requests from Irish authorities to hand over details, in accordance to Irish law, and released some data in response to 71pc of the requests.
The Irish Times reported Facebook as having said it weighs each request for user data carefully.
“We scrutinise each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each request,” Facebook said.
Most of the requests pertained to criminal activity and sought information such as a user’s name, length of time on Facebook, IP address, and sometimes actual account content, the Irish Times reported.
Facebook released the figures yesterday, in the first of what it calls a Global Government Requests Report.
