The Transparency Report Database: Government Requests for User Information (TRB) resource went live earlier this week. TRB was developed by the team behind Silk, an online platform to “create, share and find information.”
TRB currently aggregates data searchable/browsable (interactive visualizations are also available) across 19 companies and 116 countries.
Silk hopes to work with others on the project going forward and to add more data and data sources. In other words, this is just the beginning.
From the TRB Home Page:
Silk collected all Transparency Reports from major service providers and normalized them into a comprehensive data resource for investigating government requests for users’ data.
You can Explore the different Country / Company / Reporting Period pages to research specific queries.
- Governments of the World Requesting Data: USA Leads in Total Requests
- Governments Requests at Peak Levels: More Companies Respond by Publishing Transparency Reports
- The Most Compliant Service Providers
- World’s Most Inquisitive Governments, Most Compliant Companies.
As we said earlier, data from 19 companies is available. Companies include:
- Apple
- AT&T
- Dropbox
- Google|
- Verizon
- WordPres
- and 12 Others (and More to Come)
Entries for each company include data visualizations for:
- User Data Requests Received from Governments
- User Data Request Compliance Rate Over Time
- Map of Governments that Want the Data of its Users
- Fact Sheet
Each entry also includes a direct link to the web site containing the source data.
We would also like to see direct links to the source report(s) for each data point if possible as well as the dates new data became available and when it went live.
Perhaps even providing an estimate or guesstimate as to when the database will be updated next. Also, creating an archive of source reports (or leveraging The Wayback Machine) would be useful. Having all of this information in one place adds credibility to the entire product and also adds value to it as a comprehensive research tool.
This TRB toolkit is loaded with more information about the database and tutorials.
A member of the Silk development team tells us they worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation when developing this version of the database.
Kudos to Silk for creating this resource. infoDOCKET will keep you updated with developments as we learn about them.
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