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Thursday, August 29, 2013BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) — Barbados has made a request of the social networking website, Facebook, for information on the use the social media site by three of its citizens.Barbados is the only Caribbean Community country to have made such a request, so far.Facebook has, for the first time, published data on how often governments around the world request data on its users, and according to the social network, Barbados made three requests on three individual users in the last six months.Facebook did not specify the nature or type request but said it set “a very high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any information about any of our users”.There has been no official comment from Bridgetown but Facebook has outlined the conditions under which requests are accepted from Governments.“As we have made clear in recent weeks, we have stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests. We believe this process protects the data of the people who use our service, and requires Governments to meet a very high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any information about any of our users.“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. We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests.“When we are required to comply with a particular request, we frequently share only basic user information, such as name,” Facebook said.It said that it hopes the report published at https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/ will be “useful to our users in the ongoing debate about the proper standards for government requests for user information in official investigations.“And while we view this compilation as an important first report, it will not be our last. In coming reports, we hope to be able to provide even more information about the requests we receive from law enforcement authorities,” Facebook added.
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Barbados requests FB information on three citizens
