Reddit's First Transparency Report Shows Few Data Requests

Because it's January, companies have been dropping their latest transparency reports detailing government data requests from the second half of 2014 — we saw Dropbox's earlier this morning, for example. Reddit, being the massively popular website that it is, is no doubt hit with data requests, but as its first-ever Transparency Report shows, they're relatively few and far between. Despite having 174 million or so regular visitors, the site was the recipient of only 55 user data requests in 2014.

The number is really low, and looks even smaller in light of the fact it spans the entire year, not just half of it as is common with transparency reports. Of those 55 requests, 53-percent of them were US subpoenas, 8 of them were US warrants, 7 were emergency requests from the US, 6 were US civil subpoenas, and 5 were international requests.

Of those, Reddit says it provided user data on 58-percent of all the civil and government requests, as well as 64-percent of the US federal and state requests. Further breaking the data down, 30-percent of the requests that were civil or came from the US fed/states blocked Reddit from letting the user know about the request. Two of the civil subpoenas resulted in a challenge from Reddit, as they wanted info on "more than a dozen anonymous users".

Unless a court order blocks Reddit from doing so, the company notifies affected users of any data requests that arrive. Says Reddit, "Many government requests we receive contain demands to withhold notice from users that carry no legal weight", and it disregards them.

SOURCE: Reddit Blog